A few Thursdays ago was a wrap. For my brief acting career, that is. One of the benefits of having a writer’s schedule in a city like Paris is the ability to say yes to the flurry of random opportunities that pop up. When an announcement flashed across a WhatsApp group that a Hollywood comedy-thriller with an all-star cast and a wacky plot was looking for extras, I thought why not – and sent in a few headshots. (I wish I could reveal more details, but I am, alas, bound by a non-disclosure clause that the production company declined to release me from.)
I had little idea of exactly what to expect. But I certainly wasn’t thinking that one of the biggest takeaways would be spending hours with other people without access to our phones.
The part of flying that I used to relish was that it was one of the last spaces on Earth away from the distraction of always being connected. But now free wifi abounds, meaning it’s not the refuge it used to be. A movie set, on the other hand, is largely still a phone-free space. In our case, we placed them into a locked box after HMC (hair, makeup, costume) and before arriving on the actual set itself, inside a cavernous studio at Paris’s Cité du Cinéma.
Being an extra often involves a lot of waiting: you’re technically on set, but not in every scene. And even when you are in a scene, it’s rehearsed with body-doubles before the main actors arrive, then shot perhaps a dozen times, and then maybe even reshot from a different angle.
When we weren’t actively in scenes, but still on set without our phones, what else was there to do but … talk to each other? It was gloriously old school. A glimpse into what life must have been like before everyone’s head was inclined forward and averting their gaze – on the Métro, on the street, in cafes while people wait for whoever they’re waiting for. Instead, there was an intense awareness of the heat thrown off from enormous lights, the deep colour palette of dozens of costumes, many meetings of many eyes.
Among the people I met because I had no distraction from the potential awkwardness of not having met them yet: an art student from Quebec, who offered to sketch out an idea for a tattoo that I’ve been waffling on about; an early career Parisian actor who wrote fantasy fiction in her free time and shared my love for Vietnamese pho; a Haitian who had moved to France when he was 12, and hasn’t been back since; a fellow journalist who started out covering sports, but then moved into covering cinema; a Franco-Dutch programme coordinator at an academic institute.
We chatted, we read, we played charades, we gossiped. At one point, upon hearing that I was a journalist in real life, someone (none of the above) tried to convince me that the lunar landing had been staged “in an American studio”, and to investigate more deeply. (I’m obliged, at this moment, to point out that this particular conspiracy theory has been debunked, debunked, and debunked.)
In between takes, personalities seemed to pop out – of the surprisingly heavy hitting cast, as well as from fellow extras. During one scene, the programme coordinator and I were milling around in the background, having an (inaudible) conversation. As the scene was shot, and reshot, and shot again, we leant into the chance for an improv session, increasingly levelling up the absurdness of our questions to each other and our responses back. It couldn’t help but result in a quick friendship.
Somewhere around the time I graduated from college, technology seemed to stop bringing us together. Instead, it grabbed and then destroyed our attention spans and left so many of us with smartphone addiction; social media grabbed and destroyed our ability to share an informational environment. And now AI threatens to grab and atrophy our mental muscles entirely.
I think we’re just at the beginning stages of a quite significant backlash to that. Teenagers are purposely turning back to “dumb” flip phones; millennials pay money for digital detox retreats; those stupid QR-code menus are swiftly disappearing; dating apps are ceding way to singles meet-ups and dinner with strangers. In a world that has sped up, there are surprising examples of how people are willing to actually take their time: three-and-a-half-hour long podcasts get millions of listens, and Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s six-hour Racine carrée du verbe être was the best live anything I’ve seen in the past decade.
Nearly 10 years ago, I went to the German artist Tino Sehgal’s Carte blanche at the Palais de Tokyo contemporary arts centre in Paris. A few minutes into the exhibit – traipsing through empty, white-walled rooms, guided first by an incessantly question-posing child, then teenager, then adult – it dawned on me that this was the exhibit: the conversation we were having along the way. Art, like life, takes time to make and experience. Point.
The process of bringing the world to life on screen brought us to life in a way that we normally avoid. There’s an irony here – that playing roles in a faked representation of the world brought us, for a time, back to what is most real. And whether I make it into the final cuts or not, for that alone, the early morning wake-ups and the sometimes interminable waiting were far more than worth it.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
