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 | Summer 2022 • 45 Photo by Naomi Liston/LMGI where you're watching the play. You have various people coming in on what we call the queen's path, the side entrances, so the village is built in a theatrical way in the story." Liston directed grading slopes, taking down walls and building roads through environmentally delicate areas to allow access to the remote pasture-—which Lathrop would camouflage for filming—then after shooting wrapped, took pains to return the land to its former pristine state. Vikings did come to Northern Ireland, and in fact, it was Northmen who built the very first cities in the region, but Knockdhu holds even older treasures: carefully stewarded prehistoric traces of the ancient tribes who once lived there millennia before the Scandinavian invasion. "I had to work hand in hand with our senior archaeologist from Northern Ireland because what might just look like a random load of stones coming down in what might be a straight line, those are Iron Age. There have been people inhabiting that hill for thousands of years. I'd go, 'What about if we film down in this field here?' And he would say to me, 'Naomi, I know it doesn't look like anything, but you see those rocks going like that? That's evidence that they were using agriculture here.' Really, I couldn't have found Robert a more precise archaeological site to place his Fjölnir's farm on." Boyd says filming on the historic spot was "bonkers, but beautiful at the same time. It's so breathtaking and actually getting to stand there for real, even with soggy feet and cold ears, you still appreciated how beautiful it was." TORR HEAD Out on the steep slopes of Torr Head, Liston faced not only brutal ice and wind conditions to create Hrafsney, but gravity itself—transporting heavy equipment, tons of production materials and dozens of extras and animals in on a steep, windy, sliver-thin access road. "You come down a single-track road with a three-ton weight limit on it and then bust through a wall. There's a lot of earthmoving. My civil company started building the massive construction base, which is taking away the topsoil and putting in huge amounts of aggregate, which then become a sort of 45 by 45 meter aggregate base, and that becomes the working construction base. We took half the hill away to make a big flat space, then built another road that went through two fields before we came up the gradient—so when you see the king coming up the way and it's really steep, that was 100 percent real. And we had to make it sustainable enough that you can get heavy machinery up there to get all the palisade and everything, so that was a real achievement—and really great fun." "She built so many roads, it was truly amazing," said Lathrop. "She facilitated really getting all the crew and the cast and everything that we needed up to these locations safely and efficiently. And then when it was all done, she had all the roads removed and brought the land back exactly the way it was when we first saw it." A Northern Ireland resident for over a decade, Liston was prepared for the logistical hurdles of extreme weather. "You could barely stand up in the wind. The amount of money I spent on private gritters at Torr Head and Knockdhu—I mean it was getting astronomical! Even though I gritted the road, it was still so icy, there were a couple of days where we couldn't even get a the construction crew up there." She also invested in drying cabins for the builders and crew, who were working long stretches in biting storms. "It was so cold, and these are such exposed places because of their beauty. It's