Location Managers Guild International

Spring 2018

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 | Spring 2018 Point and Sequoia Park at the same time. They have slightly dif- ferent vegetation. I made a list of all the greens native to these two forests and went up with a botanist from a timber company called Green Diamond to fill up their truck with bushes, leaves and small trees—anything they needed. I also had to find places to park 15 giant trucks, which came from LA but were going on to the next location. I talked to all the neighbors to make sure having their street blocked off for a month would not irritate them. Luckily, Humboldt County is one of those places where people still really think filming is fun. They were absolutely de- lighted this was happening." Because of her work in some of the most scenic areas of California, Stammer has become a red- wood forest expert. "Our forests are the ones trying to kill the (Wrinkle) children," she says. "They're treacherous. There was a lot of running through them and dodging trees." Filming in the forest had its challenges, but at least the produc- tion team knew where the forests were. Finding a location for the Camazotz suburbs was perhaps the location team's most frustrating experience. They were trying to match the book's very specific description of this area: "The houses in the out- skirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. Each had a small rectangular lot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door." "When Meg, her little brother and Calvin show up in the sub- urbs, everything is eerily exactly the same," Taylor says. "We had to find the right neighborhood where all the houses were exactly the same. It took months. We searched from Oxnard to Long Beach to Hemet. We went everywhere. Some things were close but not quite there. Finally, Pedro Mata found the perfect location. It was a private residential area for military families in San Pedro. That was a big YES moment for me. I'm glad we found it, but it was hard to film. By the time we finally found it, we didn't have much time left. Thank goodness for the military liaison, Develyn Watson, who helped push it through." "It took three months to discover it," Mata says. "We looked and looked and looked at the whole Southland. I'd find some stuff and get permission to scout it, but military properties were not easy to get into." He discovered the ultimate location on Google Earth. "I told Alison, 'It looks good from above,'" he says. "But when I saw it, families had made changes so their homes would be more individual. Every military family had their own theme. They rearranged the greenery or put their own ornaments up. We had to take their ornaments out." With a lot of negotiating, Taylor finally got permission to film there. All progressed smoothly, Mata says, "Until we changed the filming date. There were some scheduling problems with the actors, and we wanted to move filming forward from Feb- ruary/March to November. There was a lot to coordinate and work out. Dev helped make it happen. We shot for about a week, following a week or two to prep." Another area of worry was finding locations for the planets the children visit during the search for their father. L'Engle didn't write highly specific descriptions of the ice planet Ixchel or the lush planet Uriel. They were just way stations on the journey to the evil planet Camazotz. "We had a lot more latitude to figure out what felt right emotionally," Shohan says, "taking just a few cues from the book. We spent a lot of time looking at images, asking ourselves, 'What would strike a note with Ava?' It was a long process. We pre-envisioned what they had to be, but they had to be on Earth, and that was tough. I think people will be really satisfied with the locations, and they'll be surprised with the creatures in the same way. We spent a long time figuring it out. They'll recognize the locations but say, 'Oh, I didn't visual- ize it completely but now I see what it is.' For me, it was delight- ful to create a universe." In the end, some locations were impossible to find in California, so they were built at the Santa Clarita Studios, north of Los An- geles. "We looked for a frozen lake that's on the planet Ixchel," Taylor explains. "Meg wakes up on top of the lake. Because of climate change, we couldn't guarantee any California lakes would be frozen, so we built it in the studio." For a few other locations, the cast and crew had to go to the Southern Hemisphere for a few weeks near the end of produc- tion. "We needed a long, grassy slope," Shohan says. "That sounds not too hard to find in California, but the state was in a drought. We found some hills with long grass that looked beautiful, but if you stood in them, the grass didn't move. It was dead. Ultimately, there was no solution that wouldn't have been a CGI solution, so we ended up filming it in New Zealand." "We were shooting in the dead of winter in California," Whitaker adds. "When the script called for a place 20,000 times as vi- brant and exuberant as Earth, I said, 'Let's go to New Zealand.' " He was intimately familiar with the country because he had re- cently shot Pete's Dragon there. "On Uriel, Meg is running down this hill, and there's a blue lake. We shot that at Lake Tekapo in the Mount Cook region." Taylor and her team did not go to New Zealand. Instead, local LM Clayton Tikao, who had worked on Pete's Dragon, took over location responsibilities. Ultimately, it was important to every- one that the movie absolutely capture the spirit of the book. "But we went to great lengths to challenge some of the ideas Bellamy Young in the Camazotz suburbs.

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