"I'm an extra. And so is my car!"

- an extra in "The Informant" prior to filming Tuesday at The Hickory Point Mall

One of the most exciting aspects of "The Informant" filming in Decatur has been the production's use of residents as extras.

Not so exciting? Being an extra in "The Informant."

Allow me to clarify. Yes, it is exciting when you get The Call from casting. And yes, showing up for hair and makeup is exciting. Knowing that Matt Damon is acting a few feet away from you is very exciting.

Waiting hours and hours and hours before being called to the set for roughly 20 minutes of actual on-set extra work? Not so exciting.

And that's IF you get called to the set at all.

"I was at the Firestone set for five hours," one extra said of his experience Sunday. "They didn't use me." He then headed out to the production's "fake ADM gate" with the rest of his fellow backgrounders. "They ended up using just a couple of security guards for that one."

As of Tuesday afternoon, where filming had moved to The Hickory Point Mall and Hickory Point Cinemas, this extra had still not seen the front side of a camera.

"I missed being in the group filming at the theater by 30 seconds," he said. "Now there's just a big group of us sitting and waiting."

Waiting: the unforeseen downer of the Extras profession.

Those chosen for the theater scenes still had plenty of waiting to do, according to a second extra.

"We didn't wait too long outside, but once we were inside there was a lot of sitting around. Sitting and watching a movie. Not the whole movie, just the same scene over and over again. 'The Firm.' The part where he's a snitch. Get it?"

With all this waiting around, it's nice to hear that the production crew seems to be going out of their way to keep spirits up. And it's not lost on the extras.

"This crew is so nice," the second extra said. "It really could have been a zoo with so many people. But they're all really organized, and I kid you not, when I showed up to sign in, they knew me by name."

I've got to admit, that statement blew my socks off.

But you know what? You could see it on set; for the biggest scene at the mall, at least forty extras were being used across a fairly long stretch, and each one was greeted with a handshake by the extras "wrangler" before being directed what to do when "action" was called.

So at the end of the day, is all this waiting around really worth it?

Let's check back in with the first extra. He did finally get called to the set. He was told to walk from Point A to Point B while Matt Damon paced in front of the mall. It took only one take to get the shot. After that one take, a new batch of extras was brought in.

Six hours of waiting. Five minutes on set. Seconds of screen time.

Still… "Look for me! I'm in the movie now!"

Can't wait to see it.