Deep into the shooting schedule, when exhaustion was a memory and a kind of numbness had set in, we found ourselves out on a drizzly night with dozens of our local extras climbing the steep, slippery path to the driftmouth again and again. People were willing but very tired and it looked like the night would go on and on. We broke for "lunch" at two a.m. or so, and the rain got a little heavier. As the shuttle van crawled along the narrow mud road to the catering tent we heard music. One of the native miners was picking a banjo, another singing in that high, nasal mountain way, and around them were our actors and extras in their headlamps and coal-darkened overalls—black, white, Italian—joining in when they knew the words. It was so much a scene from the movie, a feeling from the movie, that we hooked back in to why we were there, what we were doing up on that dark mountain in the middle of nowhere, and when we tore ourselves away to go back to work the night didn't seem so long anymore.