“You’re very, very beautiful, and you can be a great actress one day, if you want to be. You can learn the rest. You understood exactly what I needed yesterday and gave it to me. We were one person while you were moving toward me.” She had felt it too, and had been mesmerized by him, but she didn’t want to be. “Think about it. And thank you for giving me yesterday,” he said, and went back to the others. She was haunted by what he said and tried to forget it, but she couldn’t.
The rest of the filming went smoothly, and the three months she spent in L.A. were a magical experience. She loved working with the three women, and watching Hamish on the set. He truly was a genius. He brought out the best in everyone.
They gave her a small birthday party on the set, and she went to say goodbye to him and thank him when she left at the end of August, to go back to New York.
“I will never forget you coming out of the forest toward me,” he said to her. “I will keep that little piece of film forever, and watch you again and again. It was perfection, and so are you. Don’t forget that, and don’t let anyone tell you something different. If they don’t see the magic that is in you, then they’re blind.” He was a very dramatic person, and she had loved working for him, and had learned a great many things about filmmaking. He was an extraordinary director, and got the best performances out of everyone, not just her.
She was sad to leave the women she had worked for. They were staying for another month of shooting, and then post-production. They all felt like mother hens as they said goodbye to her, and told her to be good at school. She had had three mothers while she was working there, and she hadn’t tried to find Fabienne this time. She didn’t need her.
She was thinking of all of them as her plane took off and how sad she was to leave. It had been an incredible summer, which more than made up for the year before.
Chapter 10
Antonia never told her father about her walk-on part in Hamish Quist’s film. It only lasted for a minute or two and her father would never see it, so it didn’t matter.
She told Jake every detail of the summer, and he hung on her every word. He couldn’t believe how lucky she was to work on a Hamish Quist film, and even to be in it, when she told him about the walk-on part.
“I’ll never be in a movie again, it was a one-off,” she said firmly. “I was terrified the whole time. Fortunately, it didn’t last long.”
“You’re crazy. I would do anything to be in one of his films. I want to see it when it comes out,” Jake said fervently, and she promised to go with him. She had never seen the dailies of the clip, and didn’t care.
* * *
—
Six weeks after school started, there was a wave of excitement at the Tisch School of the Arts. Brian Kelly, the major Hollywood producer, was coming to give a lecture on filmmaking, and creating blockbuster movies in particular. Everyone wanted to attend, even the purists who wanted to make independent films when they graduated were curious.
Hundreds of students crowded into the auditorium to hear him. Jake and Antonia went together, but they couldn’t find seats together. She wound up in the only seat left in the front row, and Jake was fifteen rows behind her. Kelly was a powerfully built man of medium height with broad shoulders in his early fifties, with about five Oscars to his credit. No one could deny his success.
His lecture was powerful too. He was a bulldog of a man, and one could easily sense that nothing could stop him in the creative process. He didn’t have the finesse of Hamish Quist, but he was impressive nonetheless. He was emphatic in his speech and told them to let nothing stop them, to fight for everything they believed in, and to never sacrifice the integrity of their films. They gave him a standing ovation, and before he left the stage, he randomly picked ten students to come backstage and meet him. He apologized that he didn’t have time for Q and A from the whole audience. Antonia was startled when he picked her, and she hurried onstage with the other nine students to go backstage to meet him personally. It was an exciting moment and one of the appealing things about Tisch was that they got to meet some very important directors, producers, screenwriters, playwrights, and actors. Brian Kelly was a huge deal in Hollywood.
Antonia wound up at the end of the line of students, as the others shoved her and pushed her away. They left as soon as they had spoken to him. They were meeting him in a dressing room used for their school plays. By the time it was her turn, they were alone in the dressing room. Since he said he was in a hurry, she phrased her question to him quickly.