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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All I need is someone to get lazy with the knife … Well, they built this fake tanker, and we take it out to the farm field where they hang it from a crane and blow it up. I said, man, when you blow it up, there will be 10 million bits of aluminum in the cornfield! It will be shrapnel all over the corn! The special effects technician said don't worry. Well, I worried, so I hired some local boy scout for litter patrol. "Let's make a donation, right?" The plan was after the explosion, we will walk the rows and pick up by hand any debris that we find. So the day comes and they hang the tanker from the crane, lots of rehearsals for timing and the stuntman at the last sec- ond, flinched. They blow the tanker, and the hero truck is not even in the shot—wasted shot. And they said, well, we gotta do it again, build another one. So, I'm thinking great, double the boy scouts … I walked into the field and was shocked. The blown-up aluminum was gone! It was literally vaporized into a gas! There was so much Det Cord, it took the aluminum, melted it, atomized it—gone! And of course, we did it again. Jill: WAS THERE EVER A MOVIE WHERE YOU FELT YOU MIGHT BE A BIT IN OVER YOUR HEAD? Mike: I would say True Lies. That was my first big deal out of state, and at one point, I had 17 people working for me all over the country. From Tahoe to Washington, D.C. to Key West, Florida, I was in charge of all of it, with everything happening everywhere at the same time, it was like a big steam roller. And it's True Lies, so it's James Cameron and Schwarzenegger—this is a big deal … this was my personal "James Bond Film." Ar- nold Schwarzenegger plays a spy, and luckily, the production designer and art director both did all the Bond films. James Cameron wanted this to be a "funny Bond-type film." I loved it. We were in Newport, Rhode Island and I am flying all over the country delegating our people. You kind of have to control it, and let it go at the same time. How can I control Key West, Rhode Island, Tahoe, D.C. and Miami all at the same time? I be- came like a duck with flat feet. You go where the fires are, run around, stamp them out and go to the next fire. We get to Rhode Island and there is no snow, but it's supposed to be the Swiss Alps in the middle of winter. There is no snow! We bring all the trucks in … and the day before filming … I woke up and everything had four feet of snow. The honey wag- on, the trucks … everything's snowed in and the set looked perfect. It looked like Switzerland in the middle of winter. It was perfect snow, just as if I ordered it on the film permit. We left town and the snow disappeared along with our crew. Jill: WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR PERSONAL BEST? Mike: Maybe National Treasure, because by that time, I was more comfortable doing a big film. We built this set an hour above Park City, Utah, it was a frozen ship in the ice, and we were also in D.C. and all over the place. In Utah, we were above the tree line at the Strawberry Reservoir on a frozen lake seven miles wide. Every morning it was 20 degrees below zero. It might warm up to a balmy minus 10, maybe zero some days when there was a heat wave. It was a challenging, extreme environment. The ship set was on the shore next to the frozen lake and the director wanted to have a snowcat come across the fro- zen lake and arrive at the ship. The producer said, "I want to put this big snowcat snow groomer on the lake for this shot. Go see if it's safe." I'm thinking, dude! It's seven miles across. How do I figure out if the lake is safe enough for the weight of a snowcat? So I made some phone calls, like we do, and I found an engineer that specialized in ice. He shows up at the Strawberry Reservoir, and we jump on my snowmobile going 30 miles per hour across the frozen lake, thereby creating our own wind chill factor. We are out about 3½ miles and we're zipping along … all of a sudden, the back end of the snowmo- bile is going down and the front end is going up in the air and I quickly realized we are sinking into the slushy ice, and I'm holding the handlebars looking up at the sky. WTF??!! I am thinking, today is not a good day to die, not on my watch, so I yell, "Hang on old man!" and hit the gas all the way. The snowmobile starts to hydroplane and we are fly- ing, then we got back to normal. The engineer wants to turn around. I'm scared to death, but he wants to go back to the scene of the crime. So we circle back to where the tracks of the snow get slushy where we started to go into the lake. We stop and walk in on foot. The ice engineer declared the snow acted as an insulator trapping heat, so you have water, Suburbicon Suburbicon Photos by Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Paramount Pictures