Location Managers Guild International

LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2020 • 33 Photos by George Kraychyk/Hulu, except inset photo by Jasper Savage/Hulu level and on a personal level. I wouldn't want to do this show with anyone else. She's very easygoing, understanding and fun." Williams, who spent a lot of time in the location van on preliminary scouts, adds, "Anne and Jeremy make an excellent team. They balance out each other's strengths and weaknesses. They divide the tasks so they each feel comfortable. If there's any competition, it's healthy. They laugh and tease each other, which makes for some really fun scouts. Also, Anne and Jeremy will get the location owners to be really open to us. People like them and that helps. They have trustworthy personalities." The two met 15 or 16 years ago when Pinard became Richardson's production assistant. "When I became an ALM, we found each other again," he says. "She trusts me to do things the way I know how to do them, and I do them well. We have a lot of fun." "Jeremy and I work well together," she says. "He's my assistant, but he also gets upgraded to LM as well. I'm especially proud of one of our locations in Season 2. It was for the masked funeral, which was after the bombing where a lot of handmaidens died. It was winter, and we had a drone." Pinard arranged for the use of a golf course in Hamilton for this complicated scene. "It was one of our biggest casts for a location," Richardson says. "We had to build a road that was 700 feet long and 25 feet wide, while trying to keep the grounds pristine for the shot and maintaining the integrity of the golf course. It was quite an undertaking, yet it came off without a hitch. When we wrapped, the equipment went away, the road came up, the snow melted and you'd never know we'd been there." Pinard vividly recalls the experience. "I rented 600 four feet by eight feet sheets of TrackMAT and had a crew come in and lay the road down. We kept the bigger trucks off it, and nobody inadvertently drove across the grass. When you get them on the grass, you can al- ways tell. Another challenge at this location was the cranes. We were shooting at night, and they were 110 feet tall with lights on them—a lot higher than anything the airport would normally want to have. We set up a system so we could be in contact with the flight tower, so the lights could come down at a moment's notice if a plane were coming in. The guys at the airport seemed happy with that. They did their best to accommodate us." "As a location team, Anne and Jeremy are amazing," adds Hand- maid's Tale co-executive producer Kim Todd, who joined the series in Season 3. "It's very much a road show. We shoot only 25 percent to 30 percent in the studio (Cinespace in Toronto). We'll probably be outside more in Season 4 as June becomes more active because she is no longer captive in the Lawrence House, as she was in the third season." Speaking about Richardson, Todd says, "Anne is wonderful. A location manager has this combination of artistic and creative sen- sibility, combined with practical and sometimes gritty details of how to make a location work. Anne is fabulous on both counts. She intuitively understands what the script is asking for and what the designer, DP and director want. She looks far and wide to find the right thing, and the choices she brings are all great options. She demands that of herself, even before she shows the pictures to anyone. Not only will it be a great choice, but she and we will make it work." Todd, who joined the series after producing three seasons of Far- go, is a huge fan of Atwood's 1985 book. "I was a student of Cana- dian literature when I was younger," she says, "and my daughter read the book in school. The material is very exciting. Joining in Season 3 was like jumping on a moving train. It was the most won- derful experience you could possibly have. The material sets a very high bar. Our job is to hit that bar, and to do that we make sure we have the most fabulous creative team." Todd says Atwood visited occasionally. "She came to the set in Season 3. Someone was shoot- ing a documentary about her and wanted to record her visit. She is an executive producer and creator of the story, and her input is always welcome. But she is a very busy woman and she tends to leave those (production) details to us. We have the book, which is her vision and her voice, and that's what we build on." Burlington, Toronto

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