Photo by Peter Gluck/LMGI
with those of the period and dress their houses with
holiday decorations. All was going to plan—until they
were asked to add even more houses for the scene.
"We were a week out from shooting the Needles Street
house, and suddenly, we heard that Steven wanted a two-
block run up before the Fabelmans made the turn onto
the hero street," says Leann, "so, we go out to talk to all
the neighbors and see if we can expand our footprint and
there's one neighbor we initially can't get a hold of. When
we finally track him down, he basically says, 'you guys
are gonna have to pay me a lot of money.'"
This neighbor did not want to play ball, going so far
as to park cars from his body shop all over his front
lawn! "Sometimes, dealing with those kind of things can
be really hard," recalls Leann. With negotiations at a
standstill, she got an idea.
Even though there weren't a lot of visual effects in the
film, that night the VFX supervisor happened to be on
set. "I went over to him, explained what was going on
and asked if he could come take a look," she says. "It
was basically, 'should I just pay this guy what he's asking
for—which was well above what anyone else was being
paid—or could the VFX team deal with this one house
with all these cars?'
"So, we walk over, he takes a minute to kind of assess
the situation and, thankfully, he says, 'don't worry, we'll
take care of it.' So, it just came down to whether we
could, as they say, 'fix it in post' or if we had to spend the
money right there on this person I really didn't want to
give money to. So yeah, thanks to our VFX team on that
one for sure!"
