10 Weird Ways That Actors Coped With Difficult Shoots
2. Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin's "No Geese" Rule
Who could forget the heart-warming family movie Fly Away Home in which Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin play a father and daughter who help a flock of orphaned geese fly south for the winter? When the two actors were reunited on the set of Noah Baumbach's painful divorce comedy The Squid and the Whale, they quickly had to put the film out of their mind.
Daniels plays a University professor, Bernard Berkman who has an affair with one of his students when his marriage collapses. The student that Berkman is involved with is played by Daniels' former on-screen daughter Anna Paquin, nine years after they shot Fly Away Home.
To get past any awkwardness during the film's more intimate scenes, the two actors had to work out a way to mentally get past their prior collaboration. Waiting to film the scene where he's caught with his hands up Paquin's shirt, Daniels attempted to deflate the tension by looking out the window and saying "Oh, look, geese!"
After that, the actors tried not to think about geese whilst filming together for fear of ruining the scene.