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 | Fall 2018 • 37 During his lengthy career, Darrelmann has trained a lot of local location professionals. One of his former assistants, location man- ager David Pieper, found period locations in Berlin for the Netflix 16-episode series Babylon Berlin, which is set in late 1920s Ger- many. "A lot of people are heading further east if they want to shoot historic Berlin," he points out. "In Berlin, things have been cleaned, and it doesn't look like it used to look in the '70s and '80s. "Atomic Blonde was shot nearly entirely in Budapest, with just five days in Berlin—where we shot all the iconic bits and pieces that were left from the pre-fall of the Wall. It definitely looked right. I also did Red Sparrow in Budapest, and it looked exactly how his- toric, rundown Berlin should look. You can't stop that clean-up process in a city like Berlin, unfortunately." For Darrelman, obstacles are simply challenges to overcome. Once in a while, a location causes no problems at all. For example, with Spider's Web, "The airport in Leipzig was very easy to work with," he says. "It was expanded some time ago with the idea that lots of people would be flying in and out. It was a total miscalcu- lation! Now 80%-90% of it is used for cargo because you can fly all night without restrictions. That makes it easy to use the pas- senger parts of the airport without too much hassle. It would be impossible to do anything like that at a Berlin airport." "Leipzig Airport is the scale of a London airport, but only about a dozen planes a day fly into it," Stewart adds. "It's like a ghost town. We were even allowed to drive around the runway. We were thinking of shooting the plane in the scene where a charac- ter is arriving from the States, but we would have needed a giant airplane. We couldn't get one in the end. But we used the bridge and the passport area, and they let us change all the screens." Another location that turned out to be easier than expected to find was a spectacular penthouse apartment. This is where Sa- lander attacks a wealthy industrialist who beats his wife. "There's a scene where Lisbeth pushes over a statue of an angel," Dar- Production crew on location in Lehesten relmann says. "We shot that in a very unique Berlin apartment built on top of a World War II bunker. The owners, Christian and Karen Boros, bought the bunker from the city. It was really a gi- ant block of concrete, roughly 20 meters high, 30 meters long and 30 meters wide in the center of Berlin, in the Mitte district." (20 meters is about 65½ feet.) Constructed in 1942 as an air-raid shelter, the bunker was later turned into a prison. Eventually it became a warehouse, then a nightclub and finally, an exhibition hall. Boros and his wife renovated it in 2003 and added a glass- walled penthouse on top. Stewart found it. "We needed a really amazing penthouse, and we couldn't afford to build it," she says. "I typed into Google, 'Most amazing penthouse in Berlin' and this place came up instantly. Klaus said, 'We'll never get in there. The owner has this massive art collection. He's one of the richest guys in Berlin.' After some pushing, he did ask, and of course the owner loved the idea. I think he thought it would be fun, and probably Klaus was really charm- ing. It was a fantastic location. What a place to live! It was covered in bullet holes and shell holes because it was an actual bunker." "The property had never been used before," Darrelmann says, "and every request to film up there had been turned down by the owners. That's why I didn't put it on the plate in the first round. I spent nearly a full day formulating a very detailed and honest letter to the owner asking for his permission to film in his pent- house, and for some reason he was up for it. I do admit that I did mention some money changing hands if we filmed up there, but I couldn't get nuts with my offer for the sake of my budget. For me and my key assistant location manager Steve Sauthoff, it was one of the most stressful shots in the whole movie. The owners had millions of dollars' worth of artwork in the penthouse, and in addition to that, they turned the bunker underneath the apart- ment into a private museum with even more art. It's all modern art, including installations that you can easily mistake for some random object or even garbage that someone put in the corner or under a glass dome on a pedestal. Imagine a film crew running