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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38 • LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2018 Will checking on strange things in the Byers barn. through that. Steve and I stayed up for more than 20 hours in a row to make sure there were no problems and we didn't end up damaging anything. "We originally planned for two days of shooting, but the owner said, 'Nah. You've got one day of shooting.' It was all very tight. The logistics were challenging. There was one elevator, and it was 12 years old and occasionally breaking down, so we in- stalled cranes and furniture elevators like you use for moving. With the help of a specialist company dealing with art exhibi- tions, we carefully stored all the expensive artworks aside and brought in our relatively cheap artworks, and it all went well. Unfortunately, in the film you can't see its unique position on top of this big concrete block, but the editor had to cut it together with film from Stockholm, and it's very sleek." Another difficult location to find was the safe house where a little boy is taken. "We finally found a detached housing project, still under construction," Darrelmann says. "It had another construction site next to it. People had just moved into the new houses and were not very keen for us to take over the place. That location took an awful lot of preparation. With the support of the construction company, we held a full evening presentation and invited all the owners and neighbors. We got a Mexican food truck and poured a lot of wine and beer. Then my other assistant location manager, Mario Wittmann, and I presented what we wanted to do, asked for their understanding and answered questions. People thought, 'That's nice. They think about us beforehand and try to make it as nice for us as possible. They're getting parking spaces for me nearby.' My goal since I started was to make filming bearable for everybody, make them feel, 'These are nice guys.'" And when someone was not onboard with the plan, "We steered around him, and everything went very smoothly," Darrelmann Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment The Millennium office adds. "But there was only one person out of 150 that didn't want to cooperate with us. We could have thrown money at all the res- idents there—everyone gets $5,000 and then they shut up—but first, we couldn't afford it; and second, I'm convinced that col- laborating with the people when you are entering their privacy and homes is always the better way to go." One location that Darrelmann thought would be easy to find— one of Lisbeth Salander's apartments—turned out to be hard. "I expected that set, a 2-3 room apartment, to be put on stage," he says, "but the director wanted a location and green screens in front of the windows. We came up with something nice in the end—a '70s rundown style. Really rundown places were too far out or required too much work. There aren't that many left. You have to go hunting for them. We found this one in the Tempelhof area, a very nondescript part of town famous for the since 2008 disused airport. It's not in the eastern part of the city, although it looks very Eastern. There's an apartment complex owned by the famous German film producer Artur Brauner, who did a lot of the cheesy German movies in the '50s/'60s. He turned 100 just a couple of weeks ago, and his daughter takes care of his business. He keeps two of the apartments empty for filming. Otherwise, it would have been filled up with people, and we would have had to buy them out of their apartment." Another potentially difficult location to find was the Millennium office, where Salander's ally Blomkvist worked. "The director was asking for a cool '60s location," Darrelmann says. "I found one in Berlin on the first floor and showed it to him. He could have put green screen around it and used it as is, but he said, 'Nah. I want to be able to look out the windows.' I was like, 'Uh oh.' There are not many high-rise buildings in Berlin where you can look out the windows and not look at one of the iconic Berlin buildings like the East Berlin TV Tower, the Brandenburg Gate or similar stuff—in-