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 | Spring 2021 • 33 "I come from movies where you went everywhere and did it all practically," she says, "so working at that scale is very exciting to me." While Nolan had a few ideas about where he wanted to shoot, Polley was pleased to find there was a lot of room for discovery. Despite still finishing up the other film, she was invited to join the project. Polley knew this film was going to require a global location team who could help execute Nolan's vision—no small order when the script is only made available to a very select few. In spy film parlance, Polley carefully assembled her 'strike team.' They would have just 14 weeks of prep to bring it all together, and all had to be at the top of their game. She reached out to colleagues Julie Hannum/LMGI in California, Australia-based LM Colin McDougall/LMGI, Amanda Stevens in the UK and Enrico Latella/LMGI in Italy, a former LMGI Awards nominee who was featured in LMGI Compass for his work on 6 Underground. To prepare the international scout for the film until she could come over full time, Polley needed to recruit a trusted ally who could jump in immediately. She suggested Hayslip call Klaus Darrelmann/LMGI, a location manager from Germany who she had met years earlier while scouting Berlin for Tony Scott. The Darrelmann Objective Like Polley, Darrelmann had taken an unconventional route into the industry, never intending to get into film. He studied medicine for eight years before coming to the realization that it wasn't the life he wanted. While in school, Klaus had picked up the occasional job as a driver on local productions so he decided to reach out to some of those old contacts. Those first jobs led to work in the Location Department and, within a few years, he was working as a LM for filmmakers like J.J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Greengrass, and Steven Spielberg and racking up LMGI Award nominations for projects like Atomic Blonde, Bridge of Spies and The Girl in the Spider's Web—and a win for Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel. He didn't know it at the time, but when he answered the phone one morning in January, he was about to add the name of another massive filmmaker to that stellar list. "I got the call," recalls Darrellman, "and it wasn't a normal situation where you have a couple of weeks' notice. They basically said, 'You have three days, please fly to Oslo, check out if this is OK. Please fly to Stockholm and see if that's OK.'" They were looking for two key locations at that point: something for the opera house that opens the film and one that could serve as 'Stalag 12,' an old Soviet mine and the setting for the third act. Not unlike a character in a spy film, Klaus packed his bags immediately and got on a plane. Nolan and the team would join him in Stockholm for a scout that ended up seeing a whirlwind seven countries in seven days—a feat Polley would repeat with a crew of 40 for the tech scout, even adding a country. At one point on the scout, Chris mentioned he'd never been to Estonia, "So we said, 'let's look at Tallinn,'" says Crowley. "Keep in mind, this is at, like, five o'clock p.m. while standing on a frozen street in Stockholm," laughs Hayslip, "but Klaus quickly made a new plan and got people moving in that direction." Realizing the scale of the film, Darrelmann immediately got on a call with the local production service company in Tallinn. "I told them, 'get every clever person you know and put them on hold for the next few months. We will need everybody,'" recalls Klaus. One of the first names put forward as being a clever local LM was Kristofer Piir. The Piir Initiation Kristofer Piir/LMGI had attended film school and studied audiovisual media before finding his way into the Location Department. He had been working in Estonia for nearly a decade, diving back-and-forth between commercial projects and local features, but neither he nor his native country had ever seen a project like Tenet. When he got the call from Darrelmann, he wasn't initially told what the film was, but he did have a snippet of information. "The Warner Bros. NDA gave us a hint," Piir says with a wink. Piir was asked to upload some images of Tallinn for the team to look at, which he did and, suddenly, the phone was ringing again. "I remember them saying, 'these are great, we're coming over,'" Kristofer says. "The next thing I knew, I was going to pick them up." Kristofer would eventually find out he was working on a Christopher Nolan film shortly before he arrived at the airport and Nolan got in his van. The Tallinn Dossier When almost no one has read the script for a film, scouting can be tricky. "Part of my job is that I'm like a tour guide. A script tour guide," says Crowley. "As we're going around, I'll basically read the scenes aloud." With Crowley reading during the ride into the capital city, which dates back to the 13th century and retains its Old Town, gothic towers and cobblestone streets, they began to talk about what they could possibly shoot there. Piir had a plan for what to show the team based on their requests, but he hadn't planned on showing them locations on the ride to the hotel! He'd been briefed on finding a traditional-style opera house, but it was a more recent relic that caught Nolan's eye. Linnahall, a massive, seven-acre concrete structure was designed by Estonian architects Raine Karp and Riina Altmäe with interior designers Ülo Sirp and Mariann Hakk for the Olympics in 1980. Linnahall wasn't on Piir's list, but they diverted over to the site to take a look around. "It was frozen solid," says Hayslip, "untouched for years. I remember walking up these stairs and it was like trying to walk up a frozen waterfall." The group managed to make it safely up the icy steps and climb over a few snowbanks before Nolan turned to the team and nodded. "They wanted to get inside right away but we couldn't because I hadn't spoken with anyone from the site and didn't have the contact for the site manager on me," recalls Piir. Based on the exterior alone, Linnahall was now priority one. With permission for access granted the next day, they discovered the location was in worse shape than they could've imagined. There were only a couple of still-functioning lights, so they navigated through the interior space with iPhone flashlights glowing. "Despite its condition, we were really impressed by it, so the question became, 'what's it gonna take to dust this thing off and get it going again?'" says Hayslip. Darrelmann was dubious. "I mean, to me, it just didn't seem like it would work. The site had been closed since 2009 and was just this big, leaky building with mold and two inches of water on the floor," he says. Worse than that, according to Crowley, "One corner of the structure was literally crumbling into the Tallinn Bay." Still, it was exactly what the film needed and, realizing what a key location they'd found, Tallinn instantly became a major base for the film.