Image via Sony Pictures and MGM

007 lessons on work and life from acting in Bond

What I learned on the set of Spectre

Matthew Trinetti
Jul 10, 2017 · 13 min read

C is in Tokyo attempting to convince the Nine Eyes — reps from nine major world powers — to share their nation’s surveillance information with British Intelligence.

“Do not let them tell you we need less surveillance. We need more.”

The camera peers into the back of C’s head. He speaks with urgency. The Nine Eyes hang on every word. Their decision will shape the course of humanity — toward unity or utter demise.

To the right of C’s head sits a pensive, dark-haired, cocked “Spanish” head.

That Spanish head is mine.

Image

In 2015 I ticked off a fun bucket list item: act in a feature film.

Calling it acting miiiight be stretch, but I did spend two days as an extra (or “supporting artist” as they call it in the biz) in the last Bond film Spectre.

I write to you as someone who wouldn’t consider themselves an actor and certainly not a movie star, but a mere mortal. A guy lucky enough to live in London and be cast in one of the most iconic film series of all time.

My day job is to . So I can’t help but use this experience to shine light on an industry, a line of work, a collection of jobs that sits high on a pedestal to those of us who aren’t movie stars. I share my experience to bring Hollywood down to a level where the rest of us can examine it, demystify it and ultimately, learn from it.

Here are 007 lessons I learned on the set of Spectre.

001.The sexiest industry in the world is about playing make-believe.

“Show up in a suit.”

On the morning of the shoot, I had no idea what film I was about to be in.

There was a code name for the project (most major films seem to have code names) so we couldn’t tell anyone what film we were shooting. Production confiscated our phones at check-in to safeguard against any temptation to share pictures or videos on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Our suits were pressed and perfected in “Costume.” Our hair was trimmed and faces pampered in “Hair and Makeup.” We were shuttled in nondescript white vans from one location near London Bridge to London’s City Hall — our shoot location for the night.

It all felt very serious, very secretive. And we looked special. Famous even.

Tourists along the Thames gawked on as we hurried into City Hall, firing off their cameras and phones as if we were important dignitaries from around the globe. Reassuring of course, because that’s exactly who we were pretending to be. We were the Asians, Africans, European and North Americans suited and booted to represent nine powerful nations.

Had you found us in costume minutes earlier, a different reality would have emerged: “French” and “South African” were two Eastenders bantering about football. “German” was a pasty Canadian expat working for a boutique investment bank. “American” was a thin salt-and-peppered middle aged black guy with a striking resemblance to Barack Obama.

“Spanish” was a dark-featured 3rd generation Mediterranean-American (me).

We were at London’s City Hall this Sunday evening to play pretend. In fact, we’d spend the next twelve hours together shooting and reshooting a two-minute scene of pretend.

  • The 8-page memorandums on our desks were real, typed up by a human.
  • The tablets in front of us were brand new and fully functioning.
  • I mimed twenty-five important conversations with strangers.

We were making a movie! A huge movie. We represented one fraction of a $250 million project that millions of people would sit down and spend 150 of their precious minutes watching.

Yet the end of the day, the reality is that we were a large group of people who hardly knew each other, thrown together for a single day, pretending to be something we weren’t, acting out a scene that never happened in a place that it wasn’t, to tell a story that a group of people imagined up.

We were grown-ups playing make-believe.

Columbia Pictures via

002. Every job is a grind.

To be clear, I have no problem whatsoever with playing make-believe.

Our innate ability to imagine new worlds, create complex stories, and come up with innovative ideas is one of our greatest human gifts. One that isn’t honored or valued nearly enough, especially in the traditional workplace.

And personally, that evening was one of the most exciting and memorable experiences of my life. But it was also one of the most boring.

There’s a part of that scene where Ralph Fiennes (playing M) looks at his phone to catch an text and exchanges briefly with Rory Kinnear (playing Bill Tanner) before rushing to the balcony to call Q and check Bond’s whereabouts.

It’s roughly a twenty second scene. We spent about two hours shooting it.

M grabs phone. Looks at phone. Rushes outside.
Again.
Different camera angle.
Again.
Again.
Same camera angle, but closer.
Again.
No, no, no — further away!
Again.
Zoom into the phone.
Again.
Again.

I counted about 50 people on the top floor of London’s City Hall — shooting, acting, directing, assisting, supporting or watching. And that doesn’t include the hundreds who’d later add visual effects and in complete the film in post-production. Studying the talented Ralph Fiennes shoot what seemed like a microscopic moment over and over and over again, it hit me:

Movie Star is one of the sexiest job titles on Earth. But when you boil it down, this is what it looks like. Shooting. Reshooting. Saying the same lines, doing the same job, again, and again, and again, and again. Into the wee hours of the night. Only to do it all again the next day.

If that isn’t the definition of a grind, I’m not sure what is.

Every job — no matter how glamorous it may appear to be — is a grind.

Hollywood is no exception.

003. Only after “Action” do we really learn.

Of course, most creative pursuits — acting, writing, painting, etc — is a butt-to-chair grind. Like says:

“Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done. Most of it is not fairy dust in the least”

Ignorant to filmmaking and acting, I assumed something else: that everyone — from the actors to the director to the crew and everyone in between — know exactly what to do and how to do it before stepping onto the set.

Of course, everyone is in the room because they possess the adequate skills and knowhow to be there. And everyone has pretty clear idea how a scene and the broader story is meant to unravel. The script is written. The story is crafted. The plan is in place.

But what sits between a well-laid plan and a finished film is a humungous world that only begins to breathe after a single word:

“ACTION.”

Which words an actor chooses to intonate, which lens to use, how to position the camera, how and in which order us extras enter, move around, or exit a room — these answers don’t really exist until after ACTION.

The reality is that everyone is as they go. It felt more like well-designed improv than I imagined a huge blockbuster movie would feel.

Action first. Reflection later. Action again. Reflection again.

Until we got it right.

Only after “ACTION” did we really learn what we were doing.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Columbia Pictures/EON Productions via

004. Without desire we’re dead.

As I acted — a term I use very loosely as an extra — I kept thinking of a line from John Yorke’s book on storytelling, :

“If a character doesn’t want something, they’re passive. And if they’re passive, they’re effectively dead.”

It was was 2:30am and I was dead tired after hours of enacting the same scene over and again. So I tried asking myself:

What does my character want? What does “Spanish” want?

I wasn’t really sure and it was probably a stupid question for an extra to ask himself. But as soon as I came up with something, my acting was infinitely more alive, purposeful, fun, engaged. I woke up. I was curious again.

And isn’t that the truth? When we don’t know what we want, have no clear purpose, don’t understand what we’re aiming for — it can feel like we’re effectively and existentially dead.

It matters less what we want in the end. What matters is that we choose something to want and put in the work to go after it.

005. Hanging your future happiness on “The Destination” will fuck you up.

I work with people who want to from soul-squelching corporate jobs and into more meaningful work. Work that’s better aligned with each person’s own unique callings, gifts, ideal lifestyle. Work centered around autonomy, creativity, and personal definitions of success.

Occasionally I’ll meet someone who wants to escape from an industry or job that everyone else wants to escape into. For every person who wants to escape into a non-profit, luxury travel, Google, Facebook or the Next Big Thing — there are just as many people trying to escape from those places.

Watching Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Andrew Scott and the others working their craft and doing their jobs as actors, I can’t help but think of our Escape community. Surely some people want to escape into acting? Filmmaking? I could even fall in that category myself. Hell, maybe I want to be an almighty movie star?

Which begs a question about The Destination; this place we all seem to be hurrying, rushing, pushing our way toward.

Why do we romanticize The Destination so much? Over-romanticize it? The risk is that we’ll arrive at our new destination only to find it’s just as much a grind as the place we left. (See 002: Every job is a grind.)

This is a dangerous myth. Believing that the grass is always greener somewhere else. Once you arrive everything will be perfect.

Everything will be better when I…

…land a job with X.
…transfer to Y.
…become a Z.

It reminds me of an interview between Marie Forleo and author Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert, telling her story of becoming a megastar author, says that every pursuit, no matter how desirable it seems to be, comes with a :

“So the question is not ‘What do I love?’, the question is ‘What do I love so much that I don’t mind eating the shit sandwich that comes along with that thing?’ For me in my life, writing is the thing that I love, and the shit sandwich was the seven years that I was not getting published.”

This doesn’t mean that we don’t pursue meaningful endeavours or harbor grand desires. Instead, we remember that our happiness doesn’t live there. It’s not found only at the destination.

What if the road toward The Destination — all the struggle, the hard work, the big questions we can’t yet answer, the huge obstacles we’re not yet prepared to face, the blood, sweat, tears and heartbreak — what if all of this was the good stuff? What if the gold wasn’t found in the arrival but instead on the journey toward arriving?

Hanging the future of your happiness on a destination, no matter how glamorous, will fuck you up, every single time.

006. Deromanticize the destination, ASAP.

If living solely for the destination is futile, what can we do?

We can pull it down from dreamworld and onto a level where we can rationally examine and experience it. We can deromanticize it. Here’s what I mean:

Do you want to be a writer? Study the lives of writers from the writers’ mouths themselves (, , , and are excellent living examples).

Better yet: go write something. Spend days, weeks, months writing many things. Feel the discipline of a daily butt-to-chair grind. Experience the vulnerability in sharing your shitty writing and feeling the pain when it’s rejected, or worse, when no one cares. Still want to write? Ace. Keep going!

Want to run a cafe or a bar? Go to your local bar and talk to the bar owner about his or her day-to-day. Get a realistic picture of their life.

Better yet: get a job at a bar. My friend Alex left his corporate job in Chicago almost seven years ago to work his way from doorman to busboy to bartender to manager and now owner of a in Cleveland, Ohio.

Want to work at Google? Find someone who works there and see how they got there. Talk to many people and see how they got there.

Better yet: find someone who left Google. Ask them why they left. My friend Arielle to write in LA. Maybe you can ask her about it.

Want to be a travel blogger? Walk yourself through a travel blogger’s workday. It probably involves way more sitting down, staring at a screen than wandering soulfully through mountain passes and dancing with locals.

Better yet: launch your travel blog this week, from your current city. Why not pretend to be a traveler in your own city and post three blog posts full of photos and helpful tips? Why wait until you’re halfway around the world before you begin? Play with the tech, the tasks, the admin. Do the work.

The point here isn’t to deter you from a beautiful destination.

Give yourself a taste. Try before you buy. Deromanticize the destination.

Me “travel blogging” on a ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn. So much fun!

007. Why I almost didn’t do it.

I was sitting at my desk in Escape HQ when Milla, an employee at extras casting platform rushed down to our floor.

“We need some more guys for an AMAZING feature film. Matt? Rob? Anyone? It’ll be quick and painless and a lot of fun! I’ll jump you ahead in line for photos. Ten, fifteen minutes max.”

We each slowly peeled our faces away from our screens and turned toward Milla with a quiet cock of the head. It was a busy day in startup land.

“Too much work to do. Can’t be bothered. What’s the point? Don’t care.”

I looked around. No one was interested. And so neither was I.

I turned back to my screen.

I’m not sure what everyone else felt, but when Milla made that shout out, I felt something inside me dance. Some sort of fizz bubbled up. A single flap of a tiny butterfly wing begged for my attention before I discounted it and turned it away.

A taught me what intuition feels like. I’ve never felt it quite as strongly as I did in those months wandering, but I experienced it deeply enough to remember it. A dance, some fizz, the flap of a wing — those are some of intuition’s greatest hits. Signs to listen to.

So when my mind chimed in saying That’s stupid. What’s the point?

When the people-pleasing, socially aware person in me looked around and saw none of my peers moving…

When the self-conscious adolescent in me who cares what everyone else thinks saw no one as externally excited as I internally felt…

The dance, the single flap, the fizz bubbled up.

“You know you want this. Go for it.”

The fact is, I was the only one who knew that one of my “life to-dos” was to be on set of a major fim. I was the only one who knew I made a commitment to myself a few years ago to run wild into new experiences and try to live a more interesting story. I was the only one who could feel what was happening inside of me — the fizz, the flap, the dance.

I jumped up. “Hell yeah, I’ll do it!”

One month later I was on the top floor of City Hall being “Spanish” in Bond.

But how close I was to not doing it. I almost didn’t listen to what my insides were telling me. I almost didn’t trust in my own experience. It’s easy to miss and easier to discount.

Where this all goes, I’m not sure. But the fact remains: I’m only able to write this because in the end I did listen to it. I had the trust to entertain it. And I was met with courage to act on a curious fleeting whisper.

Even mere mortals like us can do that much.


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Thanks to Mel Fisher

Matthew Trinetti

Written by

Writer, facilitator, consultant, TEDx speaker on purposeful work, deliberate living & conscious travel. Teacher @escthecity. https://GiveLiveExplore.com.

Mission.org

A network of business & tech podcasts designed to accelerate learning. Selected as “Best of 2018” by Apple. Mission.org

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