The Training of Camille - Session 1

JJ's account of how Camille became Red Feline continues

I placed the camera back on the tripod, to fix it on one frame and go back to be part of the action, no longer just an observer. There was a lot going on outside this moment, all of it having to do with Camille. She brought a friend to our acting workshop, Natasha, a girl with very strange eyes. they were brown and blue but in stripes. She is Camille's age, she is also French and gorgeous, specially those weird looking eyes. I was listening to a tape I made with all of my favorite rock songs. She commented that if someone gave her a tape like that, she would fall in love. I didn't know how to take that. But one thing was specially significant. I was having something close to a flashback. In my living room, my old living room, after a 30 years absence, I was with two girls, dressed like hippies, listening to the Doors and Hendrix ... Am I trying to go back to a "lost youth" paradise? Was this part of an intense middle age crisis?

I had to be cruel to myself questioning my motives, my reasons to pursue this with Camille I took the rod and went back to her, she had waited long enough and it was time to continue with her torture. I didn't have to give her any instructions, in fact I didn't want to. I wanted to see her reactions, I wanted her to let herself go into the moment as she felt she should do. I instructed my actors a few days before that they should erase from their heads the HOW as in "How should I play the part". I stressed that the how is not something they should think about. All they had to do was to put themselves in the when, the why, the where and the what, they how would come automatically.

Camille was in the moment, she was who she was, and she was in a captive in her lover's room because she thought they were going to play one of "his" games. Not too different from the reality of the moment. But her lover intended to kill her. How to react to this, how to play the part, how to respond to the situation, that's what had to come automatically, she had to live it, to experience it.

But I couldn't help make some comparisons. The first time I ever played with someone, so many years before, I made up some routines, nice routines. In one early occassion my girlfriend was studying for her exams and she asked me to help her. She wanted me to ask her questions from her book, so she could she how she was doing with her studies. I agreed with one condition. For every wrong answer, she was going to receive 5 lashes. She smiled, thought about it and she agreed. So... I began the test. The subject was math. My mind was travelling back in time to that far gone moment when I started hitting Camille again.