Life on the Set 

by Kerry Hayes

Life on a movie set is everything you imagine it to be and like nothing you could dream of. Photographing it can be exciting but more often it is alternately cold, hot, wet, dirty and tedious. It can be physically challenging and always the hours are exceptionally long. Rarely does it feel glamorous. The business is populated with all the familiar Hollywood personalities so often portrayed; the big egos, slick operators, narcissists and self-important people can all be found. For the most part though you meet men and women who defy that stereotype. Whether sweeping the set, applying make up or delivering their lines, they are hard working ,obsessively committed to their craft and as often as not, honest and generous. Many are driven to create a work of art that is different, fresh, and completely original.  Short of that they are striving to make a product that will entertain, and hopefully delight you for a couple of hours and at the end of the day everyone hopes to make some money.

Every production is a  beat the clock marathon. Pressure and anxiety are constant companions every minute in the effort to complete the days assigned script pages. It took 60 hours a week for 20 weeks to shoot X-Men: The Last Stand pictured above and on the cover. Give or take, that’s 72,000 minutes. The finished movie clocks in at 104 minutes. So despite the relentless pressure, most of each day was spent waiting for “Action!” This is a fact of life on all movie sets and my job, known as  the “unit photographer” requires that I be on set for every one  of those 72,000 minutes.

My first job as a set photographer was “Zelig” by Woody Allen in 1983.  If someone had been told then that I was going to spend the better part of my life waiting for action on movie sets I would have either said they were delusional or possibly shot myself. Few lives of course go as planned. 

I eventually came to have a great appreciation for my career path and to recognize the wonderful opportunity it presented to me. Although hired to capture promotional images of the action in front of the camera I was provided a ringside seat to life on the  other side, a world as interesting and exciting to photograph as the National Geographic and Life magazine type assignments I dreamed I was headed for. I discovered life on movie sets to be as culturally unique and as visually captivating as a Fiji Island or Cajun Bayou.

The tedium of waiting, and then waiting some more is eventually of course punctuated by moments of explosive action, high drama, comic antics and astonishing beauty. It has been a privilege to have the ringside seat and to witness the greatest actors of a a generation creating unforgettable characters, to observe directors brilliantly transforming words on a page into three dimensional creations,  to see how cinematographers, set and costume designers create imaginary worlds with their obsessive attention to detail and finally to work with a small army of exceptionally dedicated crew members, all contributing their part in crafting what is surely the most collective work of art humans have yet conceived. But in the end the most fulfilling aspect of my life on the set has been the opportunity to photograph a world I discovered was so different and more fascinating than I or anyone imagines it to be.

Herein lies a window to that world.