What does it take to be a movie extra?  How is the game to be played? 
In theater there never was such a thing as an extra.  Not, at least, the way there are in motion pictures.   
Extras in plays are denoted as "with entourage" or "page #4."  But it was never fully necessary to have the extras fleshing out a scene.  In motion pictures, extras have become key for establishing shots and as the primary element in much set design.  To make a scene surreal now, all one has to do is have the main character stroll through empty streets, eat in empty restaurants, and everywhere he goes the  
only people around  are intricate to what he will do next.  The background and foreground is always devoid of others not in direct vocal contact with the main character.  It would make for a rather solipsistic story.  Reality would be skewed and the audience would be unsure if the rules of nature still applied.  

The extra cast is essential to the very foundation of most cinematic story telling. Without them the audience would be free to impose a substructure to the world the  focal character's inhabit.  The scope and breadth of film making would be far less and narrow without  
the additional players who actually operate as parameters on the world in which the film takes place.  They are the human measuring sticks of existence. 

I am now officially an extra.  I had always been the main character in my life, but now I am an inconsequential part of somebody else's.  This of course, has always been the case, but now it is thrust to the forefront of my attention.  I am of no special import to their lives, but I ultimately define their reality, and the nature of existence. 
In life, as I operate as an extra to real people, I have free will or at least, the resemblance of free will insofar as I do not have to be an extra in their lives if I choose not to be.  I could run them over, kick 'em in the balls, or say "Hello.  How are you?  My name is 'xxxxx,'" thus being more than a backdrop in front of which they live.  As a movie extra, the script confines me.  All my actions are dictated as if by the will of god.  I am disallowed free action, as is everyone.  Language is stripped from me, and pantomiming speech is all that is permitted.  I have no will of my own.  I can only follow directions.  Yet, I am essential to a greater existence beyond the limited sphere of the film's focus.  I lose self-identity and become but a part of the essence of the whole.  And as the camera rolls upon somebody else's scene, I am seen in the background as part of a collective conscious subscript and sub texture, below the radar of significance yet simultaneously indispensable until the director says, "cut," and they move on, leaving me woven into the tapestry, unfollowed. 

   It is my intention to build stories for my lost extras that I am to be.  Each extra will become somebody.  Become a focus of his own comedy or drama in which the primary focus of old becomes the will less backdrop for my character's existence until I move the narrative along and he is left behind, woven into the tapestry and forgotten like a dropped stitch. 

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