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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32 • LMGI COMPASS | Winter 2025 a fair amount of blue screen, Night Country wasn't your typical production. Thor and Einar believed they could safely shoot on real ice—though it took a bit of time to find a suitable location. "We'd find a decent lake and then realize that it was near a main road so, once it got dark, you were going to have headlights all the time and noise which we obviously couldn't have," says Einar. They ultimately settled on a location Thor knew well. "There is a lake here on private property," Thor says, "and I know the landowner personally. It's actually a lake that I've been taking my kids to skate on for years." The owner was amenable, so the only questions were whether the conditions would work for the shoot once the lake froze over and if those conditions would hold in the weeks after. From a location perspective, it also worked for a number of reasons. "The property is close to Reykjavík, which was going to function as our base, so that was obviously helpful," Thor says, "and then what was great is that there's only a single access road to the lake which meant that we could strictly control who went out there." Controlling who could access the lake was incredibly important in order to prevent distortion of the ice itself, as well as maintaining the integrity of the surface for safety. "Being on the ice is exciting," says Thor, "but it gets intense when you have to take 60 or 70 people—including your cast— and a bunch of equipment out there." With Truenorth, safety falls under the umbrella of the Location Department. "It's probably down to my background, but yes, we prefer to handle that aspect," says Thor. "Safety is our number one concern." HOW DEEP THE ICE During prep, the first order of business was to go out in a boat and measure the depth of the entire lake. "There's a big difference between falling through the ice if it's 50 meters deep versus three," says Thor, "and from the surface, you can't tell how deep it is beneath the ice so, in the unlikely event that the ice gives way, we would be in the shallows. "You have to think about it as if it could happen, so we chose areas where we knew that if something bad happened, anyone who went in could basically stand on their toes and we could pull them out." Initially, the weather gods smiled on the production, which Ensor jokingly credits to Thor, giving them an ideal situation for all the sequences they planned to shoot there. "We got very cold weather right away," Thor says. "It made the ice really clean so you could see through it and, at the surface, there were beautiful little cracks and air bubbles." If the lake had frozen in layers, with sleet or snowfall occurring between those layers, the ice would've appeared white which would have been fine but wouldn't have looked as interesting. "It was pristine," Thor says with a satisfied smile. "We ended up using that ice lake environment as a kind of one- stop shop for four or five locations," says Taylor. The ocean ice exteriors include where Navarro's sister wanders out into the darkness, when Danvers falls through the ice (partially shot in a tank) and when Officer Prior disposes of evidence. They built sets on the edge of the lake as well, including Navarro's house overlooking the sea. One other pivotal sequence that was originally meant to shoot on the ice had to be moved: The "corpse-sicle," as it came to be known. At the start of the series, a literal pile of bodies is discovered out on the ice. It's an even more gruesome version of what López had read about those Russian hikers as a child. "It turned out that it just wasn't practical to do that on the ice," says Thor, "so we moved the scene to a field at another location and you can't really tell it isn't out on the ice." SAFETY ON THE ICE Knowing about his background in glacier rescue, the crew trusted Thor. If he said it was safe, it was safe. So, every day began with a briefing in which Thor and the team would cover protocols in case of an emergency and, for the entire lake shoot, safety divers in dry suits were on standby. Once the lake had frozen over, they brought in an "ice engineer." "The engineer was with us the entire time we were there, and we were constantly taking samples and measuring the depth of the ice," says Thor. "Those measurements help us calculate the weight strength." Once they determine it's safe to work on, they also need to monitor who is going out on the ice to make sure that whoever does, comes back in. Then they need to consider vehicles, equipment and their respective weight. Yes, that's right, everything goes out on the ice—even the technocrane and a 4x4 truck that served as video village. There were even Arctic tents with heating! Basecamp. Photo by Einar Sveinn Thordarson/LMGI Checking the ice. Photo by Jethro Ensor/LMGI