Photo
courtesy
of
Sony
Pictures
Entertainment
by Nancy Mills
tt
ON LOCATION WITH
KLAUS DARRELMANN, LMGI
ALONG CAME
A SPIDER...
J
ust how frustrating is it to know that some locations you want are just
si ing there waiting to be filmed, but budget considerations prevent
you from using most of them? That was one of LM Klaus Darrelmann's
greatest challenges while working on The Girl in the Spider's Web.
The story is set in Sweden, but the thriller shot there for just four days. "Filming
in Sweden is very expensive," Darrelmann says. "They have very good social
security, which means taxes are high and therefore, the crews are expensive.
I'm not sure about any rebates. Also," he adds, "Stockholm is very clean. Spider's
Web director Fede Alvarez wanted to look at gri y, dirty locations. He wanted
clean and shiny areas as well, but in general, the more rundown the look the
be er. He didn't want to portray Stockholm as it is. That's why he went to Berlin."
"We scouted Stockholm, Prague and Berlin," Spider's Web producer Elizabeth Cantillon
says, "and Berlin was the most production-friendly and had a number of great locations
that could stand in for Stockholm. Studio Babelsberg also had full-service studio
facilities, and there's a tax incentive that helped us make the film at a budget."
The Girl in the Spider's Web is the fourth book about super-hacker Lisbeth Salander,
played this time by The Crown's Claire Foy. The story deals with battered women, spies,
cyber criminals and corrupt government officials. Grime is still available in wide swaths
of Berlin, home to more than 3.5 million residents. But when clean, upscale locations
are needed, there are also plenty to choose from—for now, anyway.
Darrelmann, who has been working out of Berlin for two decades, has seen his career
parallel the striking growth of the city as a filmmaking center. "It's been fascinating from
a location point of view," he says. "In the early/mid-1990s, I was starting in the movie
business as a driver for a very unsuccessful U.S./German co-produced TV show (Berlin
Break), just to earn some money while still studying at the university. I would go into
what had been East Germany and see all these Russian military bases that had been