LMGI COMPASS
|
Fall 2018
•
19
Norway Fam Tour
came on the first night of
filming in a wealthy suburb of
Manchester. The flippant off-
hand responses of the UPM
to my requests to respect the
neighborhood enraged me. We
had four more nights to shoot
and overstaying our welcome
on the first night would only
make it harder if we needed
extra time. After months of
being treated like a second-
class crew, the ALM and I
walked off the set. We only
returned after intervention
by the UK producer and an
apology from the Spanish line
producer. I never spoke to
the UPM after this incident,
preferring to talk directly
to the line producer. Their
behavior never improved but
the flow of information got
better!
When the production closed, I
seriously questioned whether I
could put up with that attitude
again. I found the process
soul destroying as I am used
to working with the director
and designer to develop the
look of the film. There was no
exchange of ideas between us.
The only time I spoke to the
director was to tell him that he
could not go over the 11 p.m.
curfew in a residential area.
Our final night shoot ended at
4 a.m. for which I went back
at 8 a.m. with 50 bottles of
wine and apology letters to
mend the wounds.
My faith was restored with
Taboo, Ridley Scott's eight-
part FX series, starring Tom
Hardy. This was my next
experience with a large
Location Department, and
another nomination for an
LMGI Award. Supervising LM
is a very different role from
location manager and it is
becoming more prevalent as
television productions grow.
Taboo had the biggest location
set build I have managed.
The London that production
designer Sonja Klaus created
was a shadowy, greedy and
corrupt city. Eighteenth-
century Georgian England
has all but been erased
from London. The wooden-
built hovels and dockside
buildings which stood on the
banks of the Thames were
replaced by brick structures
in Victorian times. We had to
build our own dockside with
a controllable shoreline. We
thought of digging our own
river in a field but scouting
