What happens when Hollywood meets my town

It's not that often, here, in Australia, to find out that a huge motion picture is going to be filmed around the corner from where you live. However, the weird thing about my town is that a lot of this type of thing has actually occurred to me. It must be how cheap it is to film here, and it does look very American, with our pine trees and American-style cape cod housing. We have been involved numerous times in motion picture, just from living where we live.

But, it is funny how completely obsessed you become over something, just because its happening in close range.


Last year we found out "Knowing" was being filmed here. This is the huge epic about the end of the world, starring "Nicolas Cage" and Aussie actress "Rose Byrne". Of course, I had to find out everything I could about what was going on, finding out when they were filming and where. Turns out I was able to get secret information regarding this from an "Insider". Then there was some hype in the air one night and we found out they were doing a night shoot at a Servo (Gas Depot) on the connecting highway to my town, just 5 minutes down the road from me. Perfect for my obsession, as during the day and other times when they were shooting major scenes, they had crowd barriers miles back. Everyone wants a little piece of celebrity in their lives, and this was rare to us!

Anyway, we drove down to check things out. Yes, they were in the middle of shooting a few small things, but at this point, no sign of Nick anywhere. Apparently he was coming later, some people were even saying he wasn't coming at all. The size of the fan crowd proved to me that there had not been much talk about tonight's shooting as there was only a few people scattered around. After a few epic takes of Rose Byrne screaming after her character's daughter was stolen, we decided to go home with no hope that we would be meeting any famous people anytime soon. Turns out Nicolas Cage is one of the hardest people to get an autograph from let alone meet, so we didn't have much hope at all.

Later on that night we get a phone call from "The Insider", telling us to be at the set around 4:00am. So, we set our alarms and made sure we were. Upon arrival, we noticed the small fan crowd had turned into a couple of very sleepy Nick fanatics holding posters of him. Don't worry, I got the printer happening at 4:00am and we had a couple of posters ourselves.

We asked what was going on and the Nick fanatics said he was shooting a scene soon! And they were right, we saw the guy come out from his tent, prepared to shoot another epic scene. This time it was the beginning of the end of the world, and he had to rush into the Servo and demand to know where Rose Byrne was. Brought a tear to my eye, the struggles.

After the Scene, believe it or not, he came over to us!

We all got autographs and a good 10 minute chat with him, which was amazing. He was just like anybody else, but completely shy. Regardless of his normality, its quite surreal seeing someone you have only seen on a screen in the flesh up close. This only made me buzz inside and look forward to a future in the industry, no matter how long or how hard I have to work to make it there.