Film Stories chats to three location professionals about just what it takes to find and secure the backdrops to some of cinema’s most magical scenes.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #50.
Film, by its very nature, whisks us along at an unrelenting 24 frames per second, a perpetual sense of motion that makes the medium so thrilling – and yet, it means there’s little time to consider the toil and artistry that goes into each and every shot. From the panicked crowd stumbling away from the screen when the Lumière brothers premiered the first ever shot of a train pulling into a station in late 19th century Paris, to the absorbed fascination – exactly a hundred years later – of the riveted audiences watching De Niro and Pacino face each other down in Heat, there’s been precious little chance to truly appreciate the immense effort that goes into creating the iconography of the silver screen.
Spare a thought then for the location scout, the resourceful and hard-working professional who dedicates weeks, sometimes months, to finding and securing a location which might appear in front of cameras for the most fleeting of moments. Should one of these plucky individuals manage to hunt down a location that meets the specified requirements of a demanding director, there’s still a boggling mélange of factors to consider: permits, agreements, parking, residents, the fickle political whims of local government, the looming threat of organised crime, the dangers of terrorism and so on.
If that list appeared to suddenly veer into the kind of incredibly left-field territory that you don’t normally face in your day job, welcome to the wild world of the location professional, the unsung hero of any film production.
When Film Stories gets the opportunity to talk to Janice Polley, she squeezes us in for a quick chat whilst waiting in the lobby of a Zoom call for a globe- spanning project that she’s in pre-production on.
Polley first found herself grappling with the role when she graduated from being a production assistant to location assistant in 1986’s Cobra before becoming location manager on the arm-wrestling drama (it was the ’80s), Over The Top – both of which starred Sylvester Stallone.
“You kind of learn by fire,” recalls Polley, “you survive. It was a fun movie – you’re on location with Stallone!”
Beyond human
Fast-forward to the present and Polley often now finds herself managing multiple locations across several countries, all for a single production such as Tenet, the globe-spanning 2020 blockbuster that required Polley to oversee a mind-boggling number of factors.
“With Tenet, I had a great support team,” she explains. “In each country I had a location manager because we went to eight countries, actually nine because we went down to Gibraltar to look at a boat. And we did it militaristically, I mean down to the minute.”
When we wonder aloud what that level of hyper-organisation must look like in real-life, Polley just laughs and confirms our suspicions that she’s the next stage of what human evolution may look like, including the ability to resist napping (a true superpower if ever we heard of one):
“I’m never late, no. I wouldn’t even close my eyes in the van for fear that my director will see something and say, ‘what’s that building over there?’ which sometimes happens.”
If all of that wasn’t complicated enough, sometimes a huge film production can find itself becoming something of a political football as politicians seek to twist the accompanying status and dollars to their own ends.
“The most difficult one was Tenet in Estonia,” recalls Polley, “where we filmed the sequence with all of the vehicles on that massive highway. When we first scouted, it was a different mayor, then a new mayor came in and he basically used us as part of a future political move. He gave us a really hard time and denied us. It got really touchy and reached the point where I wasn’t sure if we’d be there the next weekend. It wasn’t Estonia or the city of Tallinn, it was simply the mayor. I would rather deal with the 18th Street Gang [a notorious LA criminal organisation] because at least if you show respect to them, they will show it back. A mayor with a political agenda? That’s very difficult to get over.”
Turf war
Polley isn’t kidding about dealing with organised crime outfits either.
“It’s not something that’s common but I have come across it in a few instances in my career, in different countries,” she adds. The same is true for Jeffrey Hunter, a location manager who mostly works in Los Angeles.
When we catch up with him, a key location on his current project has fallen through and he’s rushing around LA trying to find a replacement. In quick snatches of audio messages, however, he also confirms that location scouting can take you into some pretty hairy scenarios.
“I was on the very early scouting process for Ready Player One when they were trying to see if there were any US cities that could be used for filming,” he remembers. “They were looking for something that
was a mixture of favelas in Rio, shanty-towns in India, US ghettos, so with that information I took them into the world of The Projects in South Central LA. I had to put that scout together with help from LAPD’s Gang Unit and I was escorted by two officers and a sergeant from that unit. As we were in Watts, there was a shoot- out nearby and I was quickly escorted away. That was an interesting day!”
Of course, Steven Spielberg’s 2018 dystopian drama would eventually find its urban ghetto in the – perhaps unlikely – form of Birmingham’s Digbeth district. And, at least as far as we know, production was completed with the only kind of shooting being the type done by camera operators.
Dodging bullets or not, though, the most demanding part of the job is, and will always be, attempting to meet the demands of the filmmaker by finding a way to match the image in their imagination to an actual (and workable) location in the real world. And sometimes, that can mean putting in an awful lot of hours and miles to get the job done.
Miles and miles
“Mike, I want to see everything that’s out there, that’s what he said,” recalls Mike Camoin as he reflects on his work finding the very last shot for Derek Cianfrance’s brilliant 2012 crime drama, The Place Beyond The Pines. For this writer at least, if they gave out awards for the film that boasted this century’s best opening and closing shot, Pines would most definitely be in the running, with its technically brilliant opening tracking shot and masterful, expansive closing shot that won’t be spoiled here.
With its imposing peaks offset by a sleepy farm in the foreground, the final moment is like something out of an Edgar Payne landscape, a painterly slice of Americana that is supposed to be a showcase for the enormity of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in all of their glory. Little do most people know, however, that in seeking and filming this last shot of the film, the production of The Place Beyond The Pines never got anywhere near Colorado! In fact, it never strayed more than a three-hour drive from its headquarters in Synecdoche, New York.
After the production’s scouting team had failed to find an adequate substitute for the Rockies in upstate New York, Camoin was brought onto the production with the daunting task of using his knowledge of the region to succeed where others had failed. Sitting in his office, the walls adorned with posters of films that he’s worked on, the documentary filmmaker takes Film Stories through a process which for him was something of a side hustle, yet led to him playing a key role in creating an enduring cinematic moment.
“I was budgeted seven days to find the final location,” he recalls, with Cianfrance’s requirements being very exact. “Always, I was looking for roads that went towards mountains, with a ridge for the camera,” he remembers. “I easily covered 300 miles and a lot of farms. You don’t want to let anybody down so you knock on doors, you ask questions, you take photographs.”
Living the dream
If you’re sensing a romantic appeal to the idea of simply jumping into a car and driving until the perfect cinematic vista presents itself, then you’re not alone. During our chat with Polley, she finds herself wistfully recalling the days when location scouting was unencumbered by the modern trappings of film production.
“There was no Google, you just look at a map,” she says when recalling how she drove through North Carolina to scout some of the key locations for Michael Mann’s 1992 epic, The Last Of The Mohicans. “I flew there, I had a map and you just drove. I didn’t even have a local. It was way before the days of, ‘oh, you have to go where there’s tax relief ’ or ‘you have to go no further than 20 minutes away [from a production’s HQ]’. That’s what I loved about scouting in those days because you’d turn a corner and go, ‘Oh my god, I’ve found it!’ ”
That film would mark the beginning of Polley’s decades- long working relationship with Mann, a filmmaker who is renowned for his demandingly high standards. In the early ’90s she would also work with Tony Scott for the first of several occasions and in doing so, she learned a thing or two about how to choose locations that catered to their distinctive styles.
“Tony was very much about light and image,” she explains. “When you scouted, you never gave him a photo that was taken facing north because there’d never be enough light in it. He was truly driven by an incredible image and that would set the tone for discussions. Michael [chooses locations] by how a scene plays out. There’s be lots of times when I would show him locations and think, ‘This is perfect’ and he’d say, ‘Not what I was thinking’ and you realise that he’s focused on how he’s shooting a scene.”
As for Mike Camoin, five days into his scheduled seven, the location scout found a lead in his quest to find the right location for The Place Beyond The Pines:
“I pulled over at an old gas station, and told this guy what we were looking for. He told me about a potato farm. The major mountain there is called Whiteface and [it was] on the north side of the mountain. Nobody had been there. It took me to a town called Vermontville, New York and there it was.”
The farm, overlooking the road into the mountains was exactly what he’d been instructed to look for and was within the three-hour radius of the production’s HQ.
“They called me in, huddled around my laptop and said ‘that’s it, that’s it!’ ” he recalls with a smile, though Cianfrance wasn’t ready to stop looking. “‘Mike, I want you back out there,’ he said. ‘Keep working, I want to see everything.’ That’s testament to him as a director: he wanted the best of everything.”
Having worked with plenty of the great filmmakers of the last three decades, Polley’s experience is a similar one and she too understands the artistic impulse to strive for perfection, even if her instincts tell her that the ideal location has already been discovered.
“If a director says, ‘keep looking,’ then we’ll keep looking, but at some point when you have shown multiple choices and you feel there just isn’t anything else then you say ‘this is it’.”
Finding needles
While Camoin describes finding that location as akin to “a needle in a haystack,” Jeffrey Hunter wryly describes scouting locations in Los Angeles as “a hunt for a needle in a stack of needles.”
He cites reconstructing a 1960s LA setting from multiple locations for the 2017 TV series I Am The Night as his most challenging – yet rewarding – job, with the same deep knowledge of Los Angeles helping him to source the mansion that was ‘owned’ (purely within the film’s story) by NBA star LeBron James for the 2023 remake of House Party.
“We looked at 78 homes over the course of two months, everywhere from Beverly Hills to Brentwood,” says Hunter. “Wherever I go, it’s like bringing the circus to town. We were there for 32 days; at times there were night shoots with loud music and a party going on. The main reason we chose that house was because it was a beautiful home and the location was more spread out.”
Hunter eventually opted to not to use a Beverly Hills property at all – for very practical reasons, that fans of La La Land will probably chuckle at.
As he puts it: “It’s not always the best place to shoot: it’s densely populated, it’s in the hills [and] I’ve got to think about where we’re parking everyone.”
Read more: Gladiator II and the lone hero of democracy
With that in mind, imagine how quickly Janice Polley had to act when Michael Mann finally settled on a plan to film the now-iconic showdown between Hollywood heavyweights Robert De Niro and Al Pacino at Kate Mantilini, a Beverly Hills restaurant. What’s more, it was a decision made mere days before the shoot was set to happen.
“It was Thursday night and we were shooting on Monday and I said to Michael: ‘We have to decide!’ recalls Polley. “He thought he would do it at a taco stand or some other idea. Beverly Hills [filming and event permits department] was closed on Friday so I had to call the woman at home to give me a permit. When we were doing The Last Boy Scout we shot some stuff in Beverly Hills and I luckily had her home phone number. She was very gracious and gave us a permit.”
Whether it’s securing a coveted location at the last minute, keeping residents happy or finding the Rocky Mountains without leaving New York, do wins like these bring a sense of satisfaction to these unsung heroes?
“It’s more relief,” says Polley as she recalls managing to secure Heat’s spot at LAX for the film’s climactic scene. “I don’t remember feeling any sense of satisfaction because even after the Unabomber [threat], we ended up getting to shoot that night, but of course, there’s always another problem. The next thing you know, an Air France pilot is screaming at the airport contact because somebody had turned a light on that was shining on his face as he was trying to land. You have the relief of ‘okay, I’m here’ but then there’s always another problem.”
