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
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1473039
46 • LMGI COMPASS | Summer 2022 just battering wind and it's battering rain and it's battering sleet and snow, and that's why it's so important at your morning break to get 10 minutes or at your lunch breaks to get ½ hour to come out of those elements." Mud, thick and freezing, was everywhere. It ate the legs of horses and actors, slurped up thick transport wheels and bogged down equipment. But Eggers embraced the muck as a key textural element of Amleth's bleak and bloody world. "At least one third of each day was waiting for overcast weather within a certain lighting ratio," DP Blaschke told MovieMaker magazine. Cingolani recalls that on some days it rained for hours. "What you see in the picture, we saw it and we felt it all. We felt the cold, the damp— we felt the tiredness." "In Northern Ireland, it's beautiful and it's completely green and if you're not from there, you just take it for granted, but when you walk in those fields, you start to realize that everything is boggy, everything is like a marsh," says Lathrop. "It's green for a reason. And you can't just build sets anywhere, you need Naomi Liston to help you figure out where you can build, or to build you a platform to build your sets on. She built pads for the sets because in the marshy terrain the sets would just sink right into the ground." The third main build was a Slavic town in the land of Rus, raided by Amleth and his berserkers in a spectacularly choregraphed attack sequence. An entire thatch-roofed village—complete with heavy wooden palisades and meticulously researched buildings was constructed over 15 weeks at Clandeboye Estate in Bangor, just outside Belfast. The town was carefully laid out to accommodate long one-take shots woven together into a seamless onslaught: Buildings were sketched, modeled and staked out on site, then adjusted for camera movement as stunts were added or modified. Thanks to the diversity of trees in the estate's forest, other scenes like the berserker fire ritual and Amleths' home exterior in Hrafsney were also filmed at Clandeboye. THE PLAGUE By mid-March, with final touches underway and logistical kinks being sorted, and just days before principal photography was to begin at Knockdhu and Torr Head, COVID began sweeping the globe. "We shut down production one week before we were due to start filming," Boyd recalls. "I will never forget it. At that point, we didn't really know what this pandemic was. We just heard from the government that everything had to stop." Eggers and most of the main production crew quarantined in Belfast, reorienting the shooting schedule, and working with the legal team and insurers on safety measures to restart production. "I knew that if we couldn't get the movie back up and running, more than 500 people were going to lose their jobs," Boyd says. "Yes, we wanted to make the movie, it was a fantastic project, but we needed to keep these people's jobs and keep moving forward because the future just seemed so uncertain." Production may have paused when COVID lockdowns began, but Liston's work didn't flag. She and her team secured rented equipment and materials, gated up the building doors, then battened down the hatches for whatever came next. "We're all keeping calm level heads, and I pulled out every bit of infrastructure that I could, everything that could go back to the hire companies. We just started stripping back, joiners were out—because at Fjölnir's farm, we were like three or four days away from actually starting principal photography there, so it was just, 'strap down the roof, bolt up the doors and make it all safe.'" Liston hired 24-hour security to guard the sets during the shutdown, some of which were still semi-constructed. Every week, she completed a 250-mile circuit around all the locations to check in with security teams, inspect buildings for damage and refill generators. The team noticed that the hiatus was weathering the sets to look more realistic. "Fjölnir's farm really started to bed in and grow. When you see the grass roof, that is 100 percent real grass that was allowed to grow during our lockdown period. If there is one silver lining to COVID, it was that Knockdhu bedded in, and it would never have looked how it looks without that period of time." In August, five months past its original start date, restrictions were finally lifted, and production was able to move full steam ahead. The shoot would now be creeping into the colder, wetter Autumn months and, along with the weather, the crew had to adjust to working under COVID protocols on set. "Everything that we had to put in place made life harder: the testing, the mask wearing, the social distancing, the working in a bubble. But we were lucky in that we were able to keep a skeleton crew because a lot of our sets were outside, so we could keep building," says Boyd. "As soon as we were legally allowed to get back up and running, we were just like go-go-go-go!" Adds Cingolani, "We were the first production I think in the world to start shooting again. We were like soldiers." AN ELEGANT BAIT AND SWITCH Iceland, however, remained almost totally inaccessible due to travel restrictions, and the scope of the planned filming needed to be dramatically scaled back. The team would have to execute some fancy footwork to stitch in a faithful composite of its striking seismic geography. While a second unit would eventually be able to capture the gorgeous panoramic sweep of the Svínafellsjökull glacier and a handful of village scenes on film, stunning locales like the gorgeous Fjallsárlón glacier lake and Mount Hekla—the "Gateway to Hell—geothermal pools and black sand beaches Photo by Naomi Liston/LMGI