The Location Managers Guild International (LMGI) is the largest organization of Location Managers and Location Scouts in the motion picture, television, commercial and print production industries. Their membership plays a vital role in the creativ
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ried. We'd meet up at 7 a.m. and work till 7 p.m., and then we'd have dinner together. You have to get on." The two had moments of hilarity. "For a scene where Lisbeth is being chased, I had to fill a storage unit with lots and lots of pigeons," Stewart says. "That was hard because I didn't want them to all fly out and escape, so I was filling the unit with more and more net. Klaus had to beg anyone who lived in that block of flats to let me fly 50 crapping pigeons all over their stuff. "Our funniest experience happened the day we drove six hours to get to a location. We wanted to get some lunch, but everything was shut. Finally, we found a shop that was open. There was a lady selling bread at the counter, and three feet away from her was a lady selling cheese and ham. We asked them if they would make us sandwiches, and they point blank refused, saying they were only paid to sell the food. So we stood there and made our own sandwiches in front of them. Klaus did it with good humor." Darrelmann has learned to be flexible—a quality especially use- ful for raising two young children, 6 and 4, with his wife, a former assistant in production services. "I'm way more settled than I used to be," he says. "I can't do the very stressful stuff anymore. I'm over 50 now. I can't do 18-hour days for weeks and weeks in a row, although I still do them from time to time. I try to give my family as much time as possible. Having the kids is great. They're only young once. I did my own thing before they came along. It was a good time to be at the height of things. I'm not regretting anything. If I'd started with kids sooner, maybe we would have had five, which would be more stressful than making a movie." With Spider's Web, one of Darrelmann's big stressors was rep- licating the Swedish coastline in Germany. "At first, I couldn't get my head around it because there's no place like the Swedish coastline in Germany," he says. "No one expected us to find it in Germany. That was my biggest problem. The house on the cliff was supposed to be in a mountainous environment on the Swed- ish coastline, which has rocky paths, and it should overlook the Baltic Sea." After considerable research and thought, Darrelmann had an idea. "Let's shoot it in a slate quarry," he suggested to the direc- tor. "The gray and shiny colors of the stones would make it look quite good." Eventually, he and Stewart stumbled on the perfect location. "We came across this quarry that had a museum and a hotel on top of the cliff," he says. "They were 300-400 meters apart, so we used special effects to glue the two buildings to- gether. I was kind of surprised how well that worked out." "Our most dramatic location was in Lehesten, where we shot the climax and the opening of our film," Cantillon notes. "It was a shale quarry in the Thuringia region, and the buildings were constructed with this incredible black shale. It made the location unique, beautiful and spooky. It is Nordic Noir after all!" "The quarry was very deep," Stewart adds. "It was about 100-150 feet from the very top edge to where the water is. It had been dug out over nearly 100 years. You had to drive miles and miles to get there. It's not a tourist spot. There isn't much there—just a bit of trekking in the woods for real hardcore trekkers." "And great for sandwiches," Darrelmann quibs, "if you're up for a little bit of do-it-yourself work. "For me, the biggest challenge was this sequence. We rebuilt the cliff edge partly for the final showdown. The location we used for that was a second quarry five minutes away from our main quarry. That quarry had a 200-300 feet drop to the bottom of the