Cut

AUDIO COMMENTARY TRACK

As you can already see, everything is fucked.
The shark wasn’t working and Linda
had to be replaced by a homeless man
we cleaned up and taught crude
phonetic Russian. The Thai embassy threatened
dire things, canings and worse,
extraordinary rendition to French Canada,
if we refused to swear fealty
to their epileptic despot who was deposed
in a coup while we were there
that everyone we met agreed
was fantastically bloody. I sent
word for the street urchins we’d chained
to a truck to be given cameras
and ankle bracelets that satellites can track
so we could find them
should they not return with the footage
I wanted. That’s coming up
in just a second, though mostly all you see
is the road and a lot of running
and sobbing. There. And there and also there.
The amount of viscera surprised
the crew, though to be fair,
I’d hired them off the back
of a loading dock in San Clemente
the week before. Scrappers, all of them,
and the language barriers,
which were severe, I admit,
gradually thinned their numbers
as the shoot went on. Some we buried
within sight of a graveyard
out of respect for what we thought
their mother’s stricken wishes might have been.
But it was all hypothetical
and in that heat we lost a few more
before we had a chance to pretend
our sadness was debilitating
or at least an emotion which passed for sadness
in that part of world. Look,
there is the shark again—
we made it out of packing foam
and spray-painted it ourselves
to make sure the job was done right.
We named it Bruce.
No one can say we didn’t reasonably value verite.
And I do think it resembled
something a child or person recovering
from massive head trauma
would find dangerous or scary
or at least uncomfortable to be around.
We never did find Linda
though I left the number of the hotel
none of us were staying at
because we were sleeping in the forest
taking turns at watch just like
this scene though the suspense is muted
by incorrect matting
so all you see is knees and fire
and some dialog about love
and honor and taking a stand
which was very moving to us all
though none of us wept
with our eyes on the trained chimp and his chainsaw.