Location Managers Guild International

LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2021 • 57 mean, I take my hat off to those guys because it's not just about builds and pretty pictures … it's about what it takes to organize it all." Interestingly, one element that was pivotal in terms of why they chose the location was the oor. It features a sort of chessboard pattern of beautiful black and white tile. But for the scene to work they actually had to build a false oor above the actual oor. "There is this gag in the lm where certain tiles are weighted and sink down when the Escape Room participants step on them which triggers this laser security system," says Robert, "so the oor was part of the reason they chose the location but then they had to cover the oor with an exact copy of the oor underneath." Ah, the movie business. CAPE TOWN, NEW YORK A good number of practical locations Robert and his team found for the lm unfortunately, ended up on the cutting room oor, but there is one that remains early on in the lm in which the two lead characters have to run down a busy street in New York City. This was another complicated shoot—not just in terms of making the center of Cape Town look like Manhattan visually, but down to trafc control and getting people in the business core to where they needed to go without causing too much of an issue. For example, in Cape Town, as with the U.K., they drive on the opposite side of the road. So, setting things up for that sequence took a good bit of time. AN UNREAL JOB Robert was born to parents with no connection to lm. His father was an insurance broker and his mother worked as a school secretary. Growing up under the shadow of apartheid meant that fanciful dreams of a career in the arts were perceived as just that: dreams. And though Robert showed an interest early on in cinema and photography, he nonetheless pursued a more practical education. "I studied for a bachelor of social sciences and majored in industrial psychology and business administration," he says, but in his nal year of school, he ended up going to what in the U.S. would be called a technical university in Durban on the east coast of South Africa and enrolling in a television broadcasting course. After nishing school, he ended up getting an editing job in Johannesburg only to quickly realize that was not going to be the job for him. "I had the realization that I did not like being stuck in a room for 17 hours a day," he laughs, "and I have an enormous amount of respect for editors for having briey done the job." With some connections he made in school, Robert later started working as a production assistant in the early '90s. "It was pretty wild in those days," he says. "We worked incredibly long hours. As a PA, you were rst in, last out, and then after wrap, you'd take … I probably shouldn't even say this … but you'd then take the client and agents out for dinner, sleep in the car for a couple hours, then take them out to a nightclub, drop the director back at his hotel, drop the clients off, have a shower, go back to pick up the director and go right back to set. It was crazy." After a solid run of work, Robert decided to take the money he'd made and travel a bit. "We were part of the Commonwealth and so I went over to the U.K.," he says. At that time, one of the provisions of getting a visa was that you could not work in your chosen profession. "I had stupidly told them that lm was my chosen profession," he says, "which obviously complicated things." To make ends meet, he worked in security, had a job at a bank and labored on construction sites. He was even a chef at a pub on Portobello Road for a while. During this time in London, he began dating a young South African girl he would later marry, and in 1997, they decided to head back to their home country together. "Being back in 'Joburg' (the local term for Johannesburg) freaked me out," he recalls. "Every single road had barbed-wire fences and armed guards and, coming from London, it was just shocking." Cape Town was beginning to become a hub for local commercial and lm work and so, in early '98, he packed up and moved the 800-plus miles down to the coast. "When I rst got there, I was doing key PA stuff, but in South Africa, that's a bit like a unit manager. You're handling logistics, parking all the vehicles, setting up facilities," he says. Seeing that he was sharp and had an eye for detail, Robert was approached by some locals who had recently bought some equipment and they wanted him to hire their gear on the jobs. Through that work, he met a man named Peter Curry who would become his mentor. "One day, Peter asked me if I took photographs and I said, 'yeah,' so he asked me to show him some shots from my travels abroad and the next thing I know, he offered to train me up as a scout," he says. For Robert, the opportunity was life-changing. "I completely loved the job and became really passionate about it."

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• 18-27 Cover-Story_Underground Railroad
• 50-59 Escape
• 62-63 Martini shot