Yes, Sally Field is Amazing

The first question people ask me when they hear about "Two Weeks" is "What was Sally Field like to work with?"

Which I suppose is fair, since I'm a commercial director making his first feature, and she's got a 40-year career in film,two Best Actress Oscars,two Emmys and two Golden Globes. Even my kids, when I told them about the film, wanted to know if they got to meet Sally. Why? Because she did the voice of the cat in "Homeward Bound," and they loooooooved that movie.

So here's what working with Sally Field is like:

Sally plays Anita, the mother in the film. Day one of the shoot, Ben Chaplin (her oldest son) is behind the camera, interviewing a still-healthy Anita about her life.We're shooting 13 pages of dialogue, almost all hers, that will take about 10 minutes of screen time in the finished film. That's a lot of shooting, and I budgeted two days to shoot it. But Sally wanted to do it in one. Great, I think, I can be a day ahead of schedule after the first day. They'll think I'm a genius.

We're shooting in a house in Nashville, TN.The crew is a little nervous -everyone is at the beginning of a film, but this is the first day with our two biggest stars, one of whom is a living legend. So everyone's a little keyed up. Finally, we're ready, and Sally and Ben walk onto the set. Ben crams into a tight space next to the camera. He seems a bit nervous, too. Ben's British and has been a little worried about his American accent all week (turns out it's perfect, but nobody, including Ben, knows that yet).

Sally sits down on the couch where she'll be interviewed, puts her script on the floor, her bag with her knitting, water bottle and cell phone next to it. She waits patiently for everyone to be ready. The assistant director calls "Action," and Ben asks her the first interview question.And there, in front of the camera, Sally Field becomes the character. You can hear jaws drop all over the set. She's perfect. Not good. Perfect.

And she continues to be perfect the entire day.She doesn't miss a line in 13 pages of heavy dialogue ("Fantastically memorable writing," I try telling myself.) Every gesture, every look, is real - it's Sally, yet not Sally...like she's slipped on a coat of character and became someone else. We did three takes at the most of any of the 14 scenes...one particularly emotional scene was so perfect we only did one (it's in the movie near the end). Sometimes I just asked for a second take because I wanted to see what else she had. Never because I didn't like the first one. There was one scene that didn't work quite right. It felt like a gratuitous joke to her, not something the character would actually do.We discussed it. OK, we argued about it.She was right, of course, but the screenwriter in me felt the piece needed some humor at that moment in the film. When she did it, she adjusted her performance to add a wistfulness, a bit of darker emotion behind the humor. So now a scene I wanted for comic relief works, but it's deeper and better than it would have been otherwise. And it still only tookthree takes. The most astounding thing about that first day was how high she set the bar for the rest of us. It would have been tough for anyone, cast or crew, to walk onto the set and not give their all after that.

So yes, in answer to your question, Sally Field is amazing.Thanks for asking.