Edible New Orleans Winter 2011 : Page 30
Gottwald and others took turns running lines with Mr. Henry between three and six in the morning; acting coaches were brought in to practice technique while we was cutting doughnuts. Before long, the buttermilk drop was Mr. Henry’s best-selling item. So, when he moved his operation to a larger building just off North Broad, he named it after his new pride and joy: The Butter-milk Drop Bakery and Café. The new shop had been open only a few weeks when Michael Gottwald, trying to finalize casting for Beasts of the Southern Wild, came knocking. Court 13 looked at more than a thousand people for the part of Wink, so Mr. Henry was of course flattered when he was offered the part. “But I was just opening this new bakery, working around the clock,” Mr. Henry says. “I told them I was so honored, but I just don’t have the time, I don’t think I can do it.” Zeitlin, Gottwald, and the rest of Court 13 were filming a fan-tastical adventure featuring an epic flood and mammoth ice-age beasts on a shoestring budget—in a remote bayou community in Terrebonne Parish literally sinking into the sea. Now, they were cast-ing a co-star who told them he couldn’t take the part. Gottwald repeatedly attempted to set up callbacks with Mr. Henry, but had trouble getting him to show up. Eventually, Gottwald realized that he was setting up appointments in the after-noon, which is just about the only time of day that Mr. Henry, who bakes all night and runs the shop all morning, has to sleep. So Gottwald began showing up at the bakery in the wee hours to chat with Mr. Henry about the project and run through scenes from the script as Mr. Henry prepared food for the next day. Still, the courtship was stuck in neutral. Gottwald would cajole, Mr. Henry would demur. One late night, all the producers showed up at the bakery and, before Mr. Henry could say his usual no, they laid out in more detail their vision for the project. Most importantly, they developed a plan that would work logistically and financially for the bakery. If the movie was their baby, the bakery was his, so anything that would compromise the Buttermilk Drop was a non-starter. “Up until that point, I think he had sort of imagined that we were just amateur fools making some movie in our backyard, and we liked our local baker and we wanted to put him in it,” Gottwald says. “And that’s not totally far from the truth! But we explained that we weren’t just pissing around, that we knew what we were doing, that we had a significant amount of money invested in it, we were bringing in talented people from the independent film world. Once we framed it in a serious way, that it was an opportunity and a part-30 nership, it became real. From that moment on, he was totally com-mitted—he’s the most industrious man I’ve ever met.” The filmmakers, already swamped with the demands of pre-production, had to learn to accommodate the unrelenting schedule of a baker. Gottwald and others took turns running lines with Mr. Henry between three and six in the morning; acting coaches were brought in to practice technique with Mr. Henry as he cut dough-nuts; and Zeitlin would show up in the middle of the night for mul-tiple-hour rap sessions, drawing out stories and experiences from Mr. Henry’s life that would help him with his role. “We would talk about everything,” Mr. Henry says. “How I grew up, what I’ve been through—you know I can talk—and we’d go back and forth until the bakery opened at six. It would get emo-tional, man, we’d get into things I can’t talk about without getting upset, but he used that to help me get to the emotions I needed. All of that shows up in the movie.” For Zeitlin, these marathon chats were vital. “I would take something from the script and tell him what I was pulling from, and we’d find something from his life that related to that moment. We went through that way beat by beat, line by line, and it ballooned into him telling me his life story.” This process provided a shared language between the two men—before long, Zeitlin could explain to Mr. Henry the motiva-tion in a scene with the ease of long-time friends sharing ancient sto-ries—and getting to know Mr. Henry re-shaped the character Zeitlin had created as well. “He completely changed Wink,” Zeitlin says. “The character became him. As I learned about him, his own experiences during the storm, his relationship with his father, the character became much sweeter, much more human, than I had originally imagined.” Once shooting started in April in Terrebonne Parish, Mr. Henry moved down to the bayou, leaving the bakery in the hands of his employees. (On his days off, though, he’d ignore advice to get some rest and head back to New Orleans to bake.) The film’s headquar-ters was based in an abandoned gas station on Highway 55 in the town of Montegut, thirty minutes southeast of Houma. The motley crew of eighty-five was a strange mix of film professionals, amateur artists, and local roustabouts. “I wasn’t used to such a big crew with a formal schedule,” Zeitlin says. “I was used to—maybe everyone’s tired, everyone’s hun-gry, you go for it, hopefully you get the scene shot before you get ar-rested. And Mr. Henry, he was like me. He wasn’t used to the idea of breaks. I remember once they called for lunch and he just said, ‘Hell no. You’re staying here, we’re working the scene through lunch, and then we’ll nail it when they get back.’ From that point on, he took the reigns. He was the one who rallied the troops.” If the character of Wink had begun to slowly turn into the actor playing him, on set, Mr. Henry began to morph into Wink. “He’s a leader of the people, things mean something to him,” he told me when I visited him during shooting. “Like I got my employees, if I shut down, that’s ten people that can’t feed their family.” Later that after-noon, preparing to shoot a scene with an unruly alligator, Mr. Henry strode by and whacked the gator on the tail, announcing, “I’ll wrastle edible New Orleans Winter 2011
Publication List
