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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LMGI COMPASS | Winter 2019 • 41 Turning Morocco into six Middle Eastern countries proved to be an enormous challenge for McWilliams and his team. He de- scribes the countries and their key locations: Yemen: The local market in Sana'a and the Gulf of Aden Turkey: Streets in Istanbul and an airport in Eastern territo- ries, a beach, a safe house and country roads with olive groves Jordan: Streets and airport lobby Lebanon: The opening sequence in the Beqaa Valley, where two boys are playing and their home is targeted by a missile; a lake and a green valley Afghanistan: Ruins of a village and a helicopter crash in a forest Syria: A village scene and desert, an escape across a border and a terrorist kasbah "When we were scouting for those countries, we came across amazing stuff," McWilliams says. "We had a big team, sometimes as many as 17, and whenever a new person came onboard, he'd know something we didn't know." Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan fea- tures sweeping desert vistas, often with a tiny car in one corner of the shot. "Those locations were easy," McWilliams says. "We have lots of lovely deserts here. One outside Marrakech is where we did (Oliver Stone's) Alexander in 2004. There's also the dunes in Erfoud at the edge of the Sahara, where we do a lot of filming, often with drone and helicopter shots. "For Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, we did two months' preparation and then three weeks of shooting with two full units, including four directors and four producers. We had a lovely production designer, Ruth Ammon, who gave us our brief." McWilliams and Ammon spent a lot of time together. "Initially, Lori Balton scouted with a designer who left the project," he says. "Then Lori got busy and eventually Christian McWilliams recommended me. I'm the only British guy out here who does scouting. The important locations we found for Ruth were Turkish streets, countryside, beaches and a Yemen market," he says. The Gulf of Aden (which includes the scene with blue boats) was actually shot in the port of Essaouira." Because Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is an action thriller, it's teeming with knives, deadly viruses and guns. Fortunately, plot lines in- volving gunfire pose no problems in Morocco. "It's all been done here before," McWilliams says. (Hundreds of films and TV series have shot in this North African country, including Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lawrence of Arabia, Homeland and American Sniper.) "With guns you have to let the locality know what's going on. Morocco issues a lot of permits. It's a long process, but it's very film-friendly. There's a system in place where you're given a permit from a government office called the CCM, and you show it to the local mayor, and he distributes it to the local officials. You've got to go through the correct channels. You have to respect the local ways and traditions that are not at all like the L.A. film offices." However, there are always unexpected dangers. "I'm very aware of the risks that are involved," McWilliams says. "We were going to have an entire crew up on the roof of a kasbah outside Mar- rakech that was built in the 1800s. It's called Oumnast, and we used it as a Syrian desert setting. We did a Syrian village scene and an interior in the same village and blew up a moped." Another location that brought safety issues to mind was a beach filled with refugees trying to get into boats. "We were putting a lot of extras who supposedly could swim into boats and then pull- ing them out into the water," McWilliams says. "We had marine guides and medics on standby. You always worry, especially with TV, because everything is in such a rush. My job is to point out the obvious. In TV, they listen. In movies they sometimes don't." When McWilliams needed a location for a refugee camp on the Turkish border, he found one on the outskirts of Marrakech. "The art department ordered several hundred UNHCR tents from a company in Spain that flies them out to Africa when there's a