edantron

I recently had a director piss me off beyond belief, but I kept my mouth shut for better or for worse. I was booming and mixing a reality style show in Tokyo - inside a small ramen restaurant with very little space, two hosts sitting at the bar eating bowls of ramen. I had the dp confirm that my boom will be out of frame and casting no shadows for the next shot. I boomed from behind the dp, with the director standing right behind me (super small space to work with). Shortly after we begin rolling, the director reaches out and grabs my boom pole, trying to pull it away from the shot, causing it to bang around the lights and walls, of course yielding a useless take for audio. In that moment my gut desire was to knock him down to the ground, I was furious. I'm assuming he thought that the boom was in the way or casting shadows. This guy had no ifb to monitor the sound (he refused my offer), had no visual monitor to see the shot, and perceived that what I was doing was only getting in the way. He also had way too much confidence in the hidden radio lavs I wired up, and insisted that I don't need to boom, which I would argue is not a good idea. I did and said nothing of him knocking my boom pole around in the middle of a take. I didn't mention it to anyone else, I just maintained a calm professional attitude for the rest of the day, and inside I felt like I was a push-over. I wonder if it would have been better to speak up. The director didn't seem to know much about sound, but had a huge head of confidence and ego. There were many poor sounding shots on that gig, and I know that if the director just let me do my f*** job, the production quality would have been higher. Certainly its not the last time I'll be working with these kinds of people, and I'm trying to learn the best way to handle it.