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 • 47 would now have to be found in Ireland and Northern Ireland. "We thought we had a whole show put together and all of a sudden, we had to rethink it all," says Lathrop. Liston found alternate locations that either mirrored the Nordic landscape, or painstakingly matched lighting and framing to the Icelandic footage. "She found this beautiful beach that visual effects turned black for us," says Lathrop. "There were also a bunch of scenes where we needed to find locations where we could shoot something that we could actually pull the actors out of and composite them into that second unit photography in Iceland. So, we needed to be able to shoot them from this angle with these lighting conditions." The scene where Amleth and Olga land on the Icelandic coast as slaves was filmed at Five Fingers Strand in County Donegal, whose towering sea stacks and 5,000-year-old dunes were also featured in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Another transplanted scene was a bloody ballgame called knattleikr that Amleth is forced to play as a slave. "The knattleikr game was always going to be shot in Iceland on a glacier," says Liston, "But of course, there was no way it was going to get shot in Iceland on a glacier, so I was very much tasked with 'You better find something good.'" She took cinematographer Jarin Blaschke to a remote high-altitude meadow on Eagle Mountain in the Mourne range of County Down, surrounded by granite ridges and hillocks of long native grass. "He fell in love with it and Robert fell in love with it and it worked. I ended up having to build a road literally a mile, two miles long because there's an existing very ancient quarry track which was bumpy, so I had to go in and straighten it. I wasn't allowed to move any of the boulders, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency were very much about how we were going to protect this path and the terrain that I have to use underneath the stone, and how I was going to reinstate it and put everything back. "We built this massive access road going up, we had helicopters to get the majority of the gear in, and we brought the cast in on helicopters. I cross-loaded twenty-six 40-foot lorries of equipment into tractors and tri-axle trailers which we took up, and they stayed up there [since] it was 4x4 access." To many on the production team, Liston's logistical nimbleness was remarkable. "There were many moments where we would be trekking up the side of the mountain against the wind and the rain and the snow and I would be saying, 'And you're sure that we can get the trucks up here? And we can get the lights and everything?'" says Boyd. "It was crazy, but it was magical." The climactic volcano battle at Mount Hekla was filmed at a quarry near Belfast using 15 tons of black sand veined with trenches to overlay digital lava. "I think I used all the black sand that we could find that was available in all of Ireland!" recalls Lathrop. "It was tough to get the sand the right volcanic color, but we found it." More than 400 Northern Irish residents also contributed to the film, from crew members to property owners, and the Northern Ireland Screen confirmed to the LMGI Compass magazine that the project generated an estimated $42 million into the country's economy. "The farmers and landowners were just absolutely brilliant, they're all driving the tractors and playing jokes on us," laughs Liston. Winking rumors of castle-haunting banshees and local ghost stories lent the production its own faery whimsy. "They were all amazing people, very professional and respectful of the job that we're doing," agrees Cingolani. "It went well from Photo by Naomi Liston/LMGI