As director of a Method film, my duties and storytelling tools do not end at the word "cut," and are not restricted to traditional “days." While the fantasy elements of the story exist primarily within the confines of the set and the shooting days, between those shoots, the Method continues. To enable this on a fantasy set, I constructed a postmodernist narrative around the actors themselves. The world of The Realm is the real world, and we as cast and crew have been cursed into a dream world without magic. On occasion, we can break free and live our real lives in the fantasia of our film, but it only lasts twelve hours or so before the curse reasserts ourselves. When on “Earth," we must play along with our lives as characters in the magicless realm until we can find our way back. This narrative, that the world is an illusion and the film is real, allows us to stay in character even as we leave set.
While my cast and crew are separated, at home, in their trailers, visiting with their spouses, what have you, I haunt their mundane, nonfictional lives with fictional elements having to do with the film and the “curse." A phone call that when answered delivers an audio clip from the events of the day. A letter from a character, in-character, professing love or hatred. Armor delivered not by a costumer, but from “the blacksmith." A cursed statue or coin from the world, said to alter the consciousness of the bearer. I even crafted Blight Cards, modeled after an improv game I saw in Prague, where when cued the actor must alter their motivation to suit the card’s instruction, enacting the “curse," as it were.
You don’t need all these tools, but I will show you how to make them just in case. The great thing about being director is that all systems and tools are at the end of the day, optional.
When entrancing myself upon the set of The Realm, I will be taking on the character of the Dreamender, a shapeshifting dragon-god of time, mischief, and narrative1. This will account for my shape and my ability to speak as if from on high to the actors. To maintain one foot in reality, I have constructed a narrative in my own mind about the dimensions of the film and our own, true reality being co-dependent, and how as a god I may inhabit both simultaneously. This should afford me the necessary distance to judge whether events get out of hand, the perceived power to redirect performance, and the immersion to find the best paths to which to redirect. None of my more literary works have afforded me such an opportunity. Similarly, while one of my films was a regency drama, Realm’s costuming, set design, and exotic desert location all likewise offer a much more alien and thus immersive environment for this type of guided play.
Nevertheless, the character of the Dreamender—one of the original script’s most underutilized resources, if I say so—allows for a greater depth of experience than I've ever had as a director. As I type up my ideas about storytelling, directing actors, and the conceptual ideas of Orenda's world that I find salient to the cast and crew, I intend on also keeping track of any insights I may discover on-set as well, so that we may not only carry them forward to the rest of the shoot, but any sequels we hopefully will be asked to do in future, and for an eventual publication that may help future directors. All of this, however, I will be doing, moving forward, as the Dreamender. My voice may at first read quite the same as my original voice—that of E. E. Smith—but should take on a different vernacular, one more convincing as I sink into character. I'll gradually stop thinking of myself as a man directing a film crew and start imagining myself as a primordial, die-tossing dragon of Fate that weaves narrative out of the chaos of creation with Time and Chaos. I have brought these particular characters, not the actors who portray them, here, to this place and time, for a purpose. They have roles to play, each of them, and I mine. Stories may repeat in function, but the forms they take are as countless as the stars of Hyssthur's sky.
No pages exist mentioning Dreamender as being a “dragon-god”—in fact, no pages exist mentioning dragon-gods outside of Jenna’s Legendarium. We know for a fact that Smith never read anything written by Jenna, so this is a major clue that some sort of reveal in the 3rd Act as to the Dreamender character as we know them must occur, implying he is in fact, Aethra. In hindsight this revelation is obvious, but it is worth noting that the script has to let this slip at some point, and most likely in the first draft as adapted by the author.