The Rehearsal
There was a cat in a carrier at the wedding in the cold that made the champagne nervous. I'll get to that. It's a fine place to end up, but an odd place to start and this whole story has a habit of running out of order. Let's begin somewhere in the middle.
The middle is a jeep. Nate's jeep, specifically, which squeaks. A particularly arrhythmic and unfixable squeak, activated on a dirt road in the Jemez that only exists on hand drawn maps. For one long afternoon, I was the acquaintance in the back seat, the only camping gear I packed were two cameras, a boom mic, a spotlight, and a fair amount of curiosity about where exactly we were headed. We were headed to their spot. His spot really. The one where, before I ever met either of them, and they had only known each other for two weeks, they planned the rest of their lives together. Here is the thing about Christine: she writes screenplays for a living — real ones, with option deals and notes from executives who have never once stood in a forest. So when she decided she wanted something scripted for her own wedding, she did it proper. Three acts. Act one: how they met, camping, years before any of this, long before kids or cats with significance entered the picture. Act two: the wedding, already finished business, filed under true. And act three, the ceremony, with dancing and pinatas cut with that squeaky jeep, now in its own wedding dress. After I read her script, I gave my own notes, and we decided to retcon the proposal in that same clearing Nate had never shown anyone else.
They hadn’t rehearsed. At least not any of the lines, mostly because we kept changing them the day of. Their choreography, in contrast to their acting, was tight. Authentic and beautiful. That's the detail I keep coming back to. Weeks before, in the living room where we shared movie nights months after, two people practiced their first dance for a wedding. It showed. Nate delivered his one scripted line with the grave solemnity of a man reading aircraft safety instructions. Christine, who writes other people's dialogue for a living, kept breaking character to redirect her own fiancé mid-take. We did this more than once. Considerably more than once. A point the three of us have since agreed on, fondly and often, was that their delivery was, as a technical critique, ‘charming.’ Honestly, it was the most sincere thing I have ever pointed a lens at, and those two facts are not in tension. I should mention that I was alone out there, which meant I was, for the length of that shoot, the entire crew, camera in one hand, boom mic in the other, shouting the occasional blocking note across a clearing at two people quietly rehearsing their own future. Anyone driving past would have seen a woman constantly giggling as she ad libbed every reaction, and a couple slow-dancing to no music in the middle of the woods for no visible occasion. This is what I call, on my website, the Love Story Package — the cinematic one, as distinct from the documentary package, which is a different animal entirely and a story for another post. From the inside, it's one of the more ridiculous, tender things I get paid to do.
It was staged, all of it, on purpose, by design. That was rather the point. I think we’ve decided that the word for such dishonesty is ‘art.’
The real wedding came later, in Taos, in the kind of cold that has opinions about your fingers. Mine stopped fully cooperating somewhere around the vows. The champagne, as previously noted, considered its options. And in the middle of it all Christine and Nate brought their cat in a carrier, present and accounted for, radiating the specific unbothered disdain that only a cat summoned to a formal event can produce. He had not RSVP'd and he came anyway. Nobody seemed upset. Somewhere between the Jemez and Taos the three of us stopped being photographer-and-clients and started becoming friends. There were movie nights. There were the kinds of life stories you don't typically hand over to your vendors. By the time the wedding actually happened, I was more than the filmmaker. I was invited, plus one, and I brought my own fiancee, who spent the reception getting quietly absorbed into the same easy warmth Christine and Nate seem to hand out to anyone standing near her. The finished film cuts between the two days. The fantasy and the fact, the forest and the frost. The flash-forward we shot months early finally lands where it was always headed: right up against the real thing, nearly indistinguishable in the edit.
Here's what I keep thinking about with both days sitting on the same timeline. A documentary wedding film is an act of humility. It says: this happened, and it was enough. It doesn't add anything and it does its best to take nothing away. It trusts that two people getting married, captured honestly, is already the whole story and there's something genuinely moving about that restrain. It is a style of filmmaking that refuses to improve on the truth because it doesn't believe anything needs to be embellished. A cinematic love story wants something else. It isn't especially interested in what merely happened. It wants what the day meant, pulled out and magnified, given the scale that theater and opera and every myth worth remembering have always insisted love actually deserves. It's less loyal to fact than to feeling and it will happily invent a little, rehearse a little, stage a proposal-adjacent flash-forward in a forest six months ahead of schedule. Sometimes the only honest way to tell a love story is to build it as large as it actually feels from the inside.
Neither is the more real. They're just different genres of truth.
Despite what the name implies, most people do not use scripts in their wedding films. It’s something of a niche offering of mine. Christine wanted her life to be a movie and an epic one at that: filmed backwards, in a forest only Nate could find, where he might have pulled out a ring or merely just alluded to it. And where, some time after, two people who loved each other rehearsed doing it all again, for a camera, before life went ahead and gave them the real thing anyway.
