“Mr. Dawson, you’ll work with the different actors who will play golf in the production. Your first task is to assess the strengths and weaknesses in their game. The director, Daisuke Otsuki, will take your recommendations and incorporate them into scene selection.”
Lexi had an updated script for this week, and I spent a couple of hours working with Hana on the Japanese portions. If it hadn’t been for Hana helping me, I would’ve never learned it. Japanese uses kanji characters that give you little clue as to their meaning. Without her, I would have spent the majority of my time looking words up to try to figure out what they meant. The other problem with most kanji was that they had several meanings. Many common kanji have obscure meanings that only appear in particular words.
They’d sent the script in both an English phonetic format called romaji and in kanji. Hana used both to discover when the phonetic was wrong. I was starting to learn to speak the language but wasn’t sure I would ever be able to read it.
Something else that I had a hard time grasping was that the language was spoken differently for different situations. It was very contextual. You said things one way when you hung out with your friends, another way at home, yet another way man-to-man. And you spoke still another way to children and even to seniors.
Most of a quality performance was to understand your character, and I had to use a different mindset when I spoke Japanese. When I recognized the context of the conversation and my role in it, I was able to deliver my dialogue in a manner that didn’t make Hana cringe. Between her coaching and me being a good mimic, we thought I could get by.
By eight o’clock, we called it a night. The time difference had caught up with us, and we had to be on set early tomorrow.
◊◊◊ Monday November 28
I knew I should have hidden them. Someone—or more likely
I’d unpacked the drone Dare had fixed up for me. He’d made it so it would follow me via the Wi-Fi on my phone and act as a bodycam. As I walked outside, I found Lexi and Manaia stretching in the driveway.
“Is it okay if I run with you?” Lexi asked.
“For today, sure. I plan to go out and get a feel for the local layout. I’m not sure you can keep up when I run seriously,” I said, then cringed when I realized I sounded like a dick.
“We’ll see,” she said cryptically.
“Oh, good. You have your drone. Fritz said that I should link up to it so I can keep track of you,” Manaia said.
I bit my tongue because he made it sound like he needed to babysit me. I showed him where he could download the app that would allow him to see what the drone saw. Once I flipped it on, my phone pinged to let me know the drone had found me. It rose into the air and made a quick sweep around us. Manaia got a big grin on his face.
“This could really be handy,” he said.
“I’ll show you around,” Lexi offered. “Do you want to end your run going down or uphill?”
“Let’s end on down today. I need to get used to hills again,” I admitted.
From where we were, it was a steady climb up the hill to Pepperdine’s campus. Lexi was in better shape than I expected. She was able to offer a commentary of what all the buildings were and pointed out different ones we would shoot in or around.
Manaia was drenched with sweat, and I could tell he was feeling it. I was impressed that he pushed through and kept up with us. When we turned to go back home, I slowed down, worried he might drop. I glanced at Lexi, and she agreed he looked like he was in trouble. We stopped and got our water bottles out to have a quick drink.
“Didn’t you bring one?” I asked Manaia.
He looked at me a sheepishly, so I handed him mine. He sucked it down and looked embarrassed. Lexi gave him hers, and he drank that one too. As much as he had sweat to this point, he needed it. We started to walk back to give him a chance to recover. Okay, I may have wanted to run him into the ground for being a jerk yesterday. But I didn’t want to have to tell Fritz that I killed one of his guys.
We came to an intersection, and my drone took off ahead of us and rose higher. I’d never seen it do something like that before and was worried I might lose it. I looked at my phone and turned on the video so I could see what the drone saw. The drone had spotted movement and flew over to investigate. I would have to hug Dare when I saw him next: my eye in the sky had found two paparazzi setting up to ambush us at the next corner. I showed Lexi and Manaia.
“Do we avoid them, or are you ready to be linked to me in the tabloids?” I asked Lexi.
“But I’m just your PA,” she complained.
“When has that ever stopped them?”
“He has a point,” Manaia agreed.
“You up for this?” I asked Manaia.
“No, but don’t slow down on my account. If I fall behind, I’ll meet you at the house,” he said.
