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DGA QUARTERLY 57 "I move around quickly. I lead by example. If something needs to be done, I do it. And that's how I set the mood." —ADAM SOMNER all when the studio shuttered in the early '70s. From there, his fam- ily struggled, running small, failing seaside hotels. Then in 1982, a producer threw out a lifeline: Out of the blue, Somner's father land- ed a four-week gig overseeing the budget on The Curse of the Pink Panther. "I was, like [astonished tone], 'You're going to the south of France? You're getting paid how much?' " recalls Somner. "We were skint and now we had money." He was visiting his dad on the set of Murrow, a TV movie starring Daniel J. Travanti as the ground-breaking journalist, when Somner realized his future calling. "I stood watching the ADs and thought, 'These guys have the walkie-talkies, they're the doers, they're cool,' and I thought, 'This is amazing. This is the best job in the world.'" O M N E R S T A R T E D S M A L L , as a pro- duction assistant, washing tea cups and running errands. After more than a de- cade steadily rising through the AD hi- erarchy, he started getting offers to run the floor. Then Ridley Scott hired him as 1st AD on the second unit of Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001), about the American military's disastrous attempt to capture warlords in Somalia in 1993. The way Somner describes it, the film required "a symphony of organization" among Scott's production, the U.S. Army and a fleet of Moroccan ADs in a newly dangerous post-9/11 Morocco that was standing in for Mogadishu. "We had 60 actors, [were filming] real Black Hawk [helicopters], staging huge raids," says Somner. "I don't think you'd ever make that film now. The world has changed since then." It was thanks to the decision of Spielberg 's longtime 1st, Sergio Mimica- Gezzan, to start directing TV that Somner ended up on War of the Worlds, then, ultimately, Munich, Spielberg 's thriller in- spired by the aftermath of the 1972 Olympics massacre. "There was quite a strong presence during [many] scenes—it could be incredibly tense," says Somner of a set where Arab actors were hired to play the Palestinians and Israeli actors were cast as the Israeli athletes. In a response to the roiling emotions, Somner went simple, making more than 40 flash cards with the actors' images so he and his 2nd ADs, Kevin Walsh and Emma Horton, could test each other on names. "We didn't want to have to go, 'Go get that guy and that guy,'" says Somner. "The power of knowing someone's name? It's incredible. It just changes everything. You can see the light in their eyes." Over the years, he's helped figure out how to shoot the planting and sowing of a rice field (First They Killed My Father), mapped out a three- take strategy for horse race sequences (Seabiscuit) and orchestrated a scene where brokers watched as the stock market collapsed (The Wolf of Wall Street). "I remember when we shot the scene on the floor of the trading firm the day the market crashes," wrote Scorsese in an email. "I walked on the set and [Adam] had the life of the scene planned out and rehearsed and ready to present to me, and he showed me all the different stages of panic as the scene progressed. So that freed me to concentrate on the heart of the scene, and even to open it up. To make a picture like Wolf, with a big sprawling narrative that takes place over many years and lots [of ] scenes and locations and extras and complex background action, Adam Somner made it possible." What Paul Thomas Anderson remembers about bonding with Somner—and they're close enough personally that he officiated at Somner's wedding in 2011—is that they both head to the set every day with a shared mindset. "I think we have the same sense of tak- ing the work seriously, but not ourselves seriously," says Anderson. "There's a great balance between how seriously we take it, but how many laughs we can have." "I take my job and work very seriously—but at the very same time, I have a release button," says Somner, who thinks of himself as "the cartilage between the bones and the joints." "In the end, you have to keep everyone around the director. The director has to make the film. Behind him is me. [Being] the director is the hard job. Nobody is ever going to say that the movie is bad because of me." ® S