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This Friday, the On The Road team spent its last day on the Magnolia Lane plantation before resuming its travels. One of the first sequences shot showed the departure of Sal (Sam Riley), Dean (Garrett Hedlund) and Mary Lou (Kristen Stewart), leaving behind them their hosts Jane and Old Bull Lee (Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen), their two children (played by two pairs of small blond actors) and the Dunkel couple, Ed and Galatea (Danny Morgan and Elizabeth Moss).

So there were many people on the wooden steps in the midday sun, which was drying up all the rain of the previous day. Walter Salles - director - and Eric Gautier - Director of Photography - initially chose to use wide shots, the classic choreography for farewells, the embraces, bags are loaded into the trunk of the Hudson, the car doors slam, the car moves away.

Then Eric Gautier threaded his way through the crowd, his camera on his shoulder. Looking at the small portable monitor, lots of things were suddenly visible: the coolness of Mary Lou in front of Old Bull Lee, the melancholy of Ed Dunkel as he sees his friends leave, Sal Paradise's re-awakened energy at the idea of moving on. It was sufficient for Sam Riley to simply increase his pace, the camera accompanying him, splitting the small crowd so that this last idea is captured. These moments crystallize under the direction of Salles, and give clarity to this long Southern break in the journey of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.

Once the sequence was in the can, Walter Salles made a small speech, the first one of the day, to mark the departure of Elizabeth Moss, who returned to the shooting of Mad Men. Everybody applauded. We applaud a lot at a shoot: at the end of a particularly difficult scene, the last shot of the day or a new unintended event.

And so the boss of Candy Quality Reptiles was honored. Among the testimonies recorded by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee in Jack's Book, some claim that Joan Vollmer, William S . Burroughs' partner, liked to sweep a dead tree to bring down lizards (Joan Vollmer lived under the permanent influence of the huge quantities of benzedrine which she ingested). Perhaps a question of climate, of period, or of scarcely reliable memories, but in any case it seems that modern lizards inhabit live trees of particular species. It was thus necessary to plant one tree in front of the plantation, and to call on Candy Quality Reptiles' service. A large team (the problem with lizards is their entourage) came to put a small enclosure around the shrub and began to extract dozens of reptiles from boxes full of air-holes. The small green animals rushed between the green leaves, complicating Eric Gautier's task.

In her shapeless dress, with her tangled hair, Amy Adams resumed her hallucinated expression (we would never believe it by looking at Julie and Julia, but she can play scary and has no hesitation in doing so), and attacked the lizard-tree with a broom. The last shot of the actress showed her feet covered with green animals. When she had managed to extract a lizard which had trapped itself in her matted hair, she also received compliments from the director, and the team said its farewells to the plantation.

It was nine o'clock in the evening, but the day was not over. In a nearby fire station, a studio had been improvised, where Bull Lee must soliloquize, in order to inhabit a nightmare which will disturb Sal Paradise's sleep, much later in the story, much later in the plan of the shoot. Viggo Mortensen, who likes to tinker, made a collage from texts by Burroughs, that he recited in a spectral voice. And to end, he read, in French, a page of the Voyage au bout de la nuit : "to travel is very useful, it works on the imagination."

See you in 48 hours in Toronto.

I always feel a little ashamed to be a journalist when I read or hear "it's a real needle in a haystack." There is only one reason to use this cliché a little bit more, and in Louisiana on the third day of filming On The Road, I can avail myself. Just narrate the day in reverse.

A football game

Starting at dusk, when many of the crew had deserted the stage. This film employs itinerant local technicians at every stage. And tonight, in New Orleans was the first game of the city's Saints football team, who won the Super Bowl. So it was not crowded for the last scene where no words exchanged between Kristen Stewart and Amy Adams in the kitchen of the plantation.

A tropical storm

At midday, heavy rain enriched the sound of an idle discussion between the couple Jane and Bull Lee (Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams) and their traveling visitors (Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart). While Bull Lee held forth on the good old days (the 1910s), when morphine was freely available, while at the same time his wife rambled on about the end of the world, the rain fell in buckets, it's pouring on the plantation. Patrick Rousseau, the sound engineer (the oldest member of the crew, French, based in Quebec, who has worked with Chabrol and Zack Snyder) has placed a microphone outside to collect this music. At the same time a train passed and the endless disturbance of its whistle was added to the mix. The moment was perfect.

What was less perfect was the delay that the flooding caused. Today, Thursday, Sept. 9, Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart had to film the only sequence that occurs outside the presence, a little evil, of the Lee couple. But it was already late and dusk (which falls fast in these latitudes) has caught up with the team and the players before the scene was canned. They will do it again tomorrow.

An orgone accumulator and a plantation of marijuana

In the morning, Bull Lee was visiting his orgone accumulator with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. From a distance it looks like a log cabin latrine. Convinced by Wilhelm Reich, William S. Burroughs and his fictional version Bull Lee believed in the anti-cancer properties of this cabin, built by the designers next to a marijuana plantation. Police in New Orleans are not as easygoing as in the days of The Big Easy, and it was impossible to convince them to allow the planting of cannabis plants. It is a related species, unfit for consumption, which takes the role of Marie-Jeanne. Opening the orgone accumulator, Bull Lee discovers a cat.

A pair of cats

In the U.S., we can not film with animals without the presence of an organization that protects them. Today two ladies from the Humane Society closely monitor the treatment that is reserved for the cats in the orgone accumulator. Because there are two. As soon as you put one there, it runs away. They can't put his colleague to work before the fugitive has been caught and put in a safe place. Just as one can not implement special effects using gunpowder without having held a security meeting at which the first assistant invites participants who have doubts about the operation to confer with him (which is also a way to prevent against litigation.)

While they were chasing one cat at the bottom of the meadow they saw another figure that could be a cat. If it was not standing on its hind legs to contemplate the general agitation through a black mask. Ignoring haughtily the ladies of the Humane Society, the raccoon has turned his back on them and disappeared into the bushes.

EXCLUSIVE: Francis Ford Coppola has been working for 30 years to turn Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat Generation novel On the Road into a movie. It is starting to look like it was worth the wait. Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen are joining the Walter Salles-directed adaptation that will begin this month, I'm told. She will play Jane, the emotionally damaged junkie mother of two children and the wife of Old Bull Lee. Mortensen is going to play Lee. Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley and Tron: Legacy's Garrett Hedlund are also set for the pic. Script's by Jose Rivera, who teamed with Salles on The Motorcycle Diaries. Coppola and Rebecca Yeldham are producing. The film began production today.

Adams, who next stars opposite Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale in the David O. Russell-directed The Fighter, will follow On The Road by treading on more hallowed 60s ground. She's attached to play songstress Janis Joplin in a film to be directed by City Of God helmer Fernando Mierelles that could happen next year. Mortensen just wrapped the role of Sigmund Freud in the David Cronenberg-directed A Dangerous Method.