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Director/Producer Anne-Marie Russell made the brilliant mistake of keeping a journal during the production of WORST POSSIBLE ILLUSION, spilling her guts on off-screen incidents with armed gunman, airplane art and the ever-elusive Vik. We’ve extracted the juiciest excerpts from the filmmaker’s journal ...
Hear more from Anne-Marie Russell in the Filmmaker Q&A.
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Cloud over NYC. Photo:
Coke Wisdom O'Neal
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Our most successful shoot day, as it turns out, is our one day of play…. Vik spends hours drawing on the beach, which is truly a sight to behold. A great draughtsman like Vik is able to see parts of things that the rest of us miss. So he can deconstruct something in his head and reconstruct it with his gesture. Watching him draw, the magic of seeing a recognizable image appear from a few abstract lines, is mesmerizing.
We eat sushi at a restaurant called SoHo, chased down by German beer, in downtown Bahia, the epicenter of New World African culture—it’s a perfect heteroglossic moment. I relax for the first time. I am looking forward to coming back for a visit that doesn’t involve work. When you look through the lens, you are suspended from place and time. The experience is already mapped as one of nostalgia; it’s instantly past, other, memory. Experience or Document. You have to decide. You can’t do both.
Vik gives a blindingly brilliant and amusing lecture. He’s a superstar. One of those rare and magical people who seems so touched by grace that he illuminates the way wherever he goes. Sound problems prevent us from properly capturing this event, and he quickly steps away from our lighting rig, asking, with feigned innocence, in front of 400 people “Do I really have to stand there?” Like I’m gonna say “yes,” and suffer the wrath of the rabid mob. No, Vik, we’ll just do this again sometime. No problem, I say, dollar signs ka-chinging in my mind.
“Anne,” someone yells. It’s Aaron Woolf, our director of photography… He’s on the phone. I wave him off. “ANNE!” he yells again, “Come here!” I walk over to the table, what’s up? “Selina is trapped at the house, held hostage by an armed gunman….” Right…Selina Lewis, one of our co-producers, has been captured by a gun-toting maniac…“No, I’m serious,” he says. I still don’t really believe him, and then the moment that I do, I feel compelled to rally the troops to action. Vik bursts through the saloon doors of the Hotel Congress, like so many cowboys before him, in his suede hat and dress rodeo shirt “Let’s go get the fugitive” he says, pronouncing it “foojative.” It’s a priceless moment—spontaneous, funny—and of course, not on film…
…Turns out the “foojative” was a typical desert character, drunk, a couple of guns on the rack in the pickup, plus a handgun in the glove box. Seems when the police tried to pull him over for swerving, he freaked, grabbed the guns and stumbled off into the hills—through the “yard” of our temporary home…In their earnestness, the police cordoned off a vast section of land, and forced Selina to flee to the safety of some neighbor’s house…
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 Anne-Marie and Iris in the editing room.
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I am happy with the film because I think it provides a good platform for Vik to share his magic with a wider audience. If the film is good, it’s because it’s truly Vik… [he] is a great artist, an exceptional thinker, and a truly decent human being. I am grateful to have been able to get to know him, to learn from him, and to witness him share his magic with the many people we encountered along the way. I should be sick of him by now, after staring at him on a TV screen everyday for six months, but I’m not. He’s the real deal. And that endures.
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