I am delighted to be able to announce my first appearance on the silver screen here in Germany. Blink and you'll miss me: I'm in the very first two seconds.
The shoot itself was a testament to the Germans' slavish adherence to process and authority. We'd all received an email before the shoot asking if anyone could provide a small dog in exchange for a commensurately small fee, and on arrival we noticed that the storyboard showed an elegant lady walking across the shot with a small dog perched in her handbag.
While we awaited the dog's arrival, the director picked out an incredible older lady to star as the glamorous dog-toter. She had the hairstyle and smoky eyeliner of a 1920s cabaret star, and looked like she might be old enough to have performed then as well. It's the back of her fur coat that you can see disappearing off to the left in front of me in the shot.
The quandary was, the dog was not actually that small when it arrived. It was in fact a rather plump pug, which looked like it might weigh as much as a small microwave. We had to send away for a bigger bag.
The whole way through the shoot, the dog struggled furiously to get out of the bag. The poor woman couldn't hold it any longer than the 10 seconds it took to walk across the shot, and immediately afterwards I had to lift the bag from her shoulder and pug-juggle the slavering animal as I tried to cram it's flailing legs back into the bag.
It looked at me gloweringly every time I succeeded in repackaging it, and I was sure that it was doing it's best to piss in the bag. But either the bag was watertight, or the lady's fur coat was very absorbent; somehow, we managed to get through the shoot.
"We have to have the dog," said the director apologetically. "The client wants it."
Eventually, it appears the client decided that a horribly cowed old woman, lurching drunkenly under the weight of a bulgy-eyed escapologist dog which was slowly drowning itself in it's own piss, was not how they wanted their brand to be perceived. I can't say I blame them for cutting the whole menagerie.
Her own dog, incidentally, is the huge wolfhound you can see in the background of the shot. They thought about it, but couldn't find a big enough bag.
