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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48 • LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2017 Gilford worked on Star Wars: The Force Awakens and TRON: Legacy and says joining the comparatively smaller Kingsman team could have been intimidating, especially after the first film went through three production designers. "Andy was really welcoming, bringing the new guy unto the mix, helping me understand the personalities. It's just a very tight-knit, loyal group of guys who've been together forever, they run a tight ship that's designed to cater to [director] Matthew Vaughn and how he makes movies, which is pretty brilliant." Vaughn's Kingsman films are unabashedly English, and while his first-ever sequel (as a director) is just as loyal to crown and country as the first installment, a major plot element of The Golden Circle is set in the United States. "They were looking for an American [production designer] because of the subject matter and Matthew really pushed for that," Gilford says. "They didn't want an Englishman doing American." The script puts Kingsman agents Eggsy and Merlin (Taron Egerton, Mark Strong) "in a bit of a save-the-world situation" after notorious criminal mastermind Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore) destroys their headquarters in England, forcing them to team up with their American Statesman counterparts (Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Pedro Pascal and Halle Berry) in Kentucky. Other locations include a Swedish palace, the summit of Mont Blanc and Poppy's kitschy lair in the Cambodian jungle. "This was so eclectic," Gilford says. "There are so many practical locations that were a little more meat and potatoes, then you have the fantasy sets and we had to find places in the U.K. that mirrored that stuff. Andy had to see where our ambitions wanted to take us, and then cobble it all together in reality." By then, Buckley's LM credits included Kick-Ass 2, The World's End and the first Kingsman. He estimates that about 35 percent of The Golden Circle was shot on location, up slightly from Kingsman: The Secret Service. "I had scouts in the U.S., Hong Kong and around Europe," Buckley says, but in the end, even the Statesman HQ was shot in the U.K. Buckley and his team discovered Kentucky in the English countryside on a private 530-acre farm in the rolling Chiltern Hills, a chalk escarpment just northwest of London. "We'd exhausted everything else when we found this and it was damn near what we were looking for, apart from the iconic red barns and white picket fences, the stuff you get 'round Kentucky, which we knew was going to be difficult to find," Buckley says. "Scouting is not necessarily just finding locations, it's also eliminating options to see what is out there and what's not out there." It turned out that the pine woods at the Chilterns location were also a perfect double for the forests of the Italian Alps, serving as the real backdrop for a scene that takes place at a mountain hut. Another major set piece that plays out in Italy was shot on location at the base and 3,500-meter summit of Mont Blanc in Courmayeur, on a brand-new rotating cable car. The film also featured a bowling alley on a golf course in Surrey as part of Poppy's Cambodian enclave and the production spent several days shooting at Althorp House, the historic 90-room home in Northamptonshire where Princess Diana once lived, for the interior of a Swedish palace. Althorp and its 13,000-acre estate have been held by the Spencer family since 1508. "It was a fantastic location because no one's ever filmed there," Buckley says, adding that it's not a National Trust property. "The problem with [those] houses is they come with so many restrictions and regulations, and rightly so, but you can't touch this and you can't touch that. Lord Spencer opened his arms to us. He's got paintings there going back hundreds of years and he's integrated it with modern art, that's the kind of person he is. We had such a good time there." Another historic London location, Berry Bros. & Rudd on St. James's Street, doubled in The Golden Circle for a Kingsman safe house. The shop, opened in 1698, is home to Britain's oldest wine and spirit merchants. Its cellars date from the early 18th century when would-be Emperor Napoleon III held secret meetings there during his exile in the 1840s, plotting his return to France. Now they're used for wine tastings and other private events, and Buckley says Kingsman might have been the first feature to shoot on the site. "We had to build a false wall and hide the area downstairs in the cellars that's used for clients who pay a lot of money to dine there," Buckley says. "In between their bookings, we had to take out the doors, build the wall and hope the paying diners didn't know it was there." Other central London locations were unavoidably conspicuous. The production had to shut down Savile Row, the elegant Mayfair street known for its bespoke tailors, on a day when Buckley's family visited the set. "That's when the penny dropped for them that the location team works damn hard and we have a lot of responsibility. We didn't have a unit base, so we did the catering This photo and at right: The historic Berry Bros. & Rudd on St. James's Street, doubled for a Kingsman safe house.