As most superstars are within the fields of Movies and Music I figured this would be the place to ask.
I’m guessing they don’t do the 9-5 lifestyle but that it’s rather a period of really long hours and then some slacking time. But how long are the working periods and how long is the slacking time?
Is there f.ex. time for Madonna to go shopping and sightseeing in Paris if she’s on World Tour? Or for Bale if he’s shooting a movie in Prague?
I’m aware that it must differ a LOT, but if someone could give me some insight, I’d appreciate it.
Film set hours don’t get free time at all for the most part. You get up really early in the morning and work until evening, and then go home and sleep. I believe that quite often you work 7 day weeks.
If you’re the crew, you’re working 90% of the time, setting up lights and the camera, moving cables, cleaning stuff, setting up props, etc. The other 10% of the time you’re waiting for the scene to be shot.
If you’re the acting talent, then things are reversed. You spend 90% of your time sitting around with nothing to do, because you could be called to perform at any given moment. The actual scene only takes a few minutes. But like I said, you can’t go off doing stuff while the crew is setting up the scene because it could be 20 minutes until you’re called or two hours, but once it’s time for you to come on, you’d better be there because it’s already long enough days without delays.
The time the actor is supposed to arrive on set and be prepared is “call.” Call can be at any time of day or night — perhaps to accommodate the lighting with night shoots, dawn shoots, sunset shoots, and so on — or to accommodate the availability of a location, such as shooting in a deserted mall during off-peak hours — or to accommodate the availability of other actors, crew, or resources.
Sometimes this means hellishly long days. An actor with a lot of makeup, for instance the latex mask Robert Llewellyn wears as Kryten in “Red Dwarf,” may have to arrive hours before the rest of the cast. And he may be there hours afterward getting it removed.
If you have Twitter you should check out Stephen Fry’s feed. He tweets all day long and it’s interesting to see what exactly he does. He does a lot of flying, cocktail partying, shopping, writing, walking and dinners. He also does quick scene filming for TV show and movie guest appearances and goes to crazy locations and does crazy things for documentary filming.
Very strange to be sitting around at work and get one of his tweets on my phone about what fabulous new thing he’s up to now. I’ve only been following him for a coupla months and I’m exhausted!
Stephen Fry is using Internet abbreviations (LOL) and emoticons! That feels wrong somehow. It’s like finding out that Shakespeare wrote dirty limericks.
