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 | Winter 2019 • 33 Photo: Jan Thijs/Amazon Prime Video by Nancy Mills tt TOM CLANCY'S JACK RYAN BEYOND BORDERS E verybody loves Jack Ryan. Since Tom Clancy introduced his CIA analyst-turned-action hero in his 1984 thriller The Hunt for Red October, film audiences have poured into theaters to watch different incarnations of Ryan. Alec Baldwin introduced the character to the screen six years later in Hunt. Then Harrison Ford took over the role in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). Ben Affleck stepped up for The Sum of All Fears (2002), and Chris Pine most recently played him in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). Now it's John Krasinski's turn. The 6' 3" actor takes on the Jack Ryan identity in Amazon Prime Video's eight- episode series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. It could be called The Early Years since Episode One introduces Ryan as a CIA analyst with a little military training and a lot of smarts. Because television doesn't like its heroes sitting in front of a computer, Ryan is soon out in the field with an instinct for finding trouble. "The varied worldwide locations of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan were critical to the storytelling," says Carlton Cuse, co-showrunner, executive producer and co- creator of the television series. "A great location manager is an essential translator of story into image. We were blessed to have five of them on this project. They worked across the globe to deliver the incredible looks necessary to give the show the critical sense of authenticity. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is as far from a backlot show as possible. It's a story about Jack Ryan getting out from behind a desk into the world. So we absolutely had to have our actors do the same thing." "We treated this series as if it were a really long feature film," producer Robert F. Phillips adds. "Our goal was to be as real as possible, and for that we needed authentic locations. We wanted people to believe they were watching reality." To achieve that result, Phillips worked closely with Montreal-based Michèle St-Arnaud, LMGI, Moroccan-based Christian McWilliams, LMGI, Washington, D.C.-based Peggy Pridemore, LMGI, and Paris-based Arnaud Kaiser, LMGI. He also spent time with his Los Angeles-based supervising international location scout Lori Balton, LMGI, whom he hired to handle the initial scouting. No wonder he summed up the making of the series in one word: "Complicated." Here are some of the unique challenges that kept the location managers busy! • Each LM worked in a different country. The biggest chunk of filming—53 days—took place in Montreal. Morocco followed with three weeks of filming. Paris involved four or five days and Washington, D.C./ Maryland took four days. • There was no returning to locations, except for a closed hospital in Montreal. • None of the location managers knew each other or consulted each other as they went about their jobs. Production designer Ruth Ammon, who took over when the original production designer left during pre-production, was their main point of contact. She and the LMs relied on SetKeeper, an online service, which allowed everyone to put their pictures, docu- ments, schedules, scripts, budgets on one site. The show had four directors and several crews often working at the same time. If you add gunfights, explosions, drones, language problems, refugee camps and disturbing depictions of Ebola, it seemed a recipe for chaos. However, according to St-Arnaud, "The series finished on time with the usual reshoots a large show would normally incur and on budget to all the producers' satisfaction!" Ammon took her cue from Cuse, who, she says, "kept using the words 'authentic' and 'scope,' which meant 'big vistas.' I think we got those, but I had no idea what I was getting into when I got the job. It's a boy movie. I learned about helicopters, tanks and black sites. I never stopped running for six months. I never slept. I was dealing with teams in four different countries all the time. This was the most complicated show I have ever worked on." Communication was an enormous challenge for Ammon. "The location managers all spoke different languages with different accents," she says. "There was Montreal French and Parisian French, plus Arabic, Berber and British English in Morocco and American English in D.C. Connecting with them all at the same time was tough, although in one way, it was nice to have four separate entities, as opposed to one location manager, who had all the information. It kept me on top of things because those people had to get their jobs done."