In the summer of 1994, I worked on my first Hollywood studio film. Titled “Dragonheart,” it was shot on location in various towns in Slovakia—just hours away from my homeland, the Czech Republic. Fresh out of film school in Los Angeles, I jumped at the chance to work on a major studio feature—overseas no less.
As anyone who works on motion pictures knows, the experience of shooting a film is not really about the story being created in front of the camera. It’s all about what goes on behind the lens. On this Hollywood blockbuster, there was certainly plenty of real-life material for a budding writer to choose from. Yet, despite the hamburger incident in Poland, the explosion at the castle, the carrot-top head bandage, and the pneumatic straw shot through the forearm, despite all of this rich story material, the thing that ended up immortalized in my short story "Bakaly" was a completely non descript road in Slovakia.
Yes, a road. A simple, uneventful, regular ol' road in one of the towns where production set up camp. I don’t remember which town it was. It was a road a few of my fellow crewmembers and I walked on one of our days off; we had gotten a bit lost on our weekend excursion and had to find our way back into town before sundown. A local told us this road would take us into town, and so we walked, in near-silence, for what seemed like hours, down an endlessly winding hillside.
