Location Managers Guild International

LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2021 • 21 thought, 'Wow! This is genius.' This is what motivated me to do it. I was already a Barry Jenkins fan, and I've seen If Beale Street Could Talk and Moonlight 9,000 times. This story was unique, and to have that train running underground was genius. Even though The Underground Railroad is ction, it deals with the issues of slavery in a unique, inspiring and sometimes modern way." Jenkins was also enamored of the idea of an underground railroad. "When I was a kid, someone said the underground railroad was the way slaves got their freedom," he says. "I pictured Black people on trains underground. That's magic, but for me it was real. Nobody levitates in this show, yet there was magic everywhere. Magical realism makes literal what has been metaphorical. That's what the journey was." "I trusted that Barry would manage the subject matter properly," says Alison. "He turned out to be what I was hoping for— and more than I could have ever dreamed of. He was trying to tell a story. He's not into gratuitous violence. You feel the pain of what is happening, it's not packaged as bloody gore." "Originally, the plan was to have a location manager for the three segments of the show—Savannah, Atlanta and outside Savannah," shares production designer Mark Friedberg. "After working with Alison a bit, I said to Barry that we should let her run the whole show, and he agreed completely." It was decided that the journey that would take Cora from the slave quarters, cottonelds and swamps of Georgia, through the eerily burnt-out forests of Tennessee, into a creepy cultish community in North Carolina and a Black utopian community in Indiana, would all have to be found in Georgia. Metaphors aside, it was Alison and her team who would now have to nd the real places that would ground the story and allow it to move forward and on track. THE PLANTATION "There had to be a plantation," says Alison. "We have to see what Cora is dealing with and how she deals with it. She has to suffer through the rst episode, which explains why she needs to leave." There's the big Greek revival house, the live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, the white columns and the sweeping veranda. The Myrtle Grove property in Richmond Hill, Georgia, also had swamps, elds and a lush forest—only cotton and slave quarters were needed to complete the picture of what life there would have been like. It was the location that distressed Taylor the most, hitting a nerve that resonated in her DNA. "It was awful," she says. "The impact of slavery is so much bigger than what people think. 'Oh, you survived a moment of abuse.' It was important to communicate much more of the history of what those times were and what those times felt like. "It was difcult to be there and do my job every day knowing what this place had been. It was hot and sticky and overwhelming to think about the risks people had to take to get away—running through swamps, crawling with who knows what, being chased through the forest. We lmed deep in the swamp—it was a surreal yellow swampy muck—to tell one of the most heartbreaking pieces of the story. It all hit me hard—I didn't like being there. "We wound up lming in two places for the cotton. We lmed in a commercial cottoneld for the big wide shots so you could see the expansiveness. But we also grew cotton near the slave quarters. "I spent a lot of time talking to cotton farmers because we were trying to gure out how to grow cotton off-season. I couldn't believe I was talking to people about growing cotton, but it was my job. Savannah KALM Ryan Watterson/LMGI and I did a lot of researchon cotton and well-digging. We planted cotton and grew it. We had to install a well because we were irrigating cotton." ALM Benny Sutton/LMGI recalls that "It was six months of building and work in the unforgiving Savannah summer. Over the years, the property has been used for a lot of period pieces that are lmed around Savannah. We were in the eld and the actual plantation house. We were in a swamp on that property. This is where I learned how much the crew relies on the location team to keep their support services going, especially in 100-degree weather." "Our production designer, Mark Friedberg, built the entire community of slave quarters used in the rst episode," Taylor adds. "We made a deal with the property owner that he could keep them. He was trying to have more lming on the property. He agreed not to allow any lming on it that would air prior to the releasing of the series. They're still there. That was part of the negotiation from the beginning."

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