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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40 • LMGI COMPASS | Winter 2019 Photo: Jan Thijs/Amazon Prime Video. Inset photo courtesy of Christian McWilliams/LMGI neighborhoods looks like a maze with mainly one-way streets. When you ask for a street closure, you have to bring to the local authority all the solutions to allow emergency vehicles and people who live in the surrounding streets to enable them to access and leave the neighborhood." Ammon worked closely with Kaiser. "He found the locations," she says. "We were trying to find that look that's iconic for Amer- icans and is also feasible. Arnaud would take us to an area, and we'd walk around until we found the right frames. The French producer also helped find locations. He was very patient. We'd come in and demand things. At the time, Paris was under attack. People were being shot and blown up, and here we were shoot- ing people and blowing things up. We were throwing bits and pieces all over the streets." According to Kaiser, filming Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan when Paris was under siege didn't really cause problems. "Actually, the only restrictions we had were not having gun sounds and also being careful with extras dressed in police uniforms as the real police officers were targets. So we had to find holding areas as close as possible to the sets to hide these extras between the takes. We had to do a lot of field work. It is important to spend time on loca- tions to meet people living or working in the neighborhood and talk with them. Shop owners or building caretakers are very often sources of very valuable information. "The second important point concerns providing information to residents in order to give them the general idea of what is going to happen. The communication beforehand can often dis- arm problems that might have occurred on the day of shooting. However, I was also in contact with the police and firefighters to warn them of calls from people who might have not received the information. The street debris had to be managed in a very military way with a very timed schedule." THE FRENCH LOCATION TEAM: Location Manager: Arnaud Kaiser, LMGI Assistant Location Managers: Alphonse Huynh, Augustin Werkoff Location PAs: Gaëlle Risch, Martin Pype, Laura Bercholz, Kija King, Emilien Obert MOROCCO CHRISTIAN McWILLIAMS, LMGI has lived and worked in Morocco for 16 years, after relocating from London. He started his film career as a runner and became a location assistant on Howard's End in 1992. He moved up to LM on The Remains of the Day a year later. "I speak French, and I know about 200 words in Ara- bic," he says. "It gets me by. I can order a beer." Recently, he has worked on such projects as Syriana, Babel, Mamma Mia!, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The A-Team, World War Z and two Mission: Impossible movies. He is currently working on John Wick 3: Parabellum. Lori Balton lined up Christian in Morocco at the suggestion of LM Mike Meehan, LMGI. Phillips says, "When I met Christian in Morocco, we started up a conversation. He had a unique knowledge, so I hired him. All the Moroccan location people were excellent. Basically in Morocco if you can find it, somebody will be able to find someone to eventually say yes." "My most difficult location to find was a place in Morocco that looked like a market in Yemen, where one of the characters gets kidnapped," McWilliams says. "The capital of Yemen, Sana'a, looks very particular. There's nothing like it in the world. In the end, it was a combination of special effects, CGI and a very poor little district in Marrakech that we filled with extras in Yemeni costumes." MICHAEL BAY "Michael Bay is one of the executive producers," producer Robert F. Phillips says. "He had an in- fluence on the series, but it wasn't on a day-to- day basis. His influence was by reputation and by 'let's make this aspirationally synchronous to a Michael Bay project when it comes to the action and the scope,' which of course, you al- ways want for a Tom Clancy-Jack Ryan project. For instance, with the battle scenes, we'd always have in mind, 'Michael Bay is going to be look- ing at this, and it better look like a Michael Bay action shoot.'" Bay brought in Harry Humphries, a former U.S. Navy Seal, and his people to consult on scenes involving the military. "Harry is a decorated war hero from the Vietnam War," Phillips says. "He's been running ops for film companies for 40+ years and has a bunch of veterans who work for him or he can reach out to. He brings them and suddenly, everything is really real—not just a bunch of stuntmen going through the basics." Photo courtesy of Amazon Prime Video