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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28 • LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2025 FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT 2025 Supervising location manager ILT JONES/LMGI was presented with the LMGI LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD for a remarkable career spanning three decades of mentorship and a seamless integration of real-life locations with the fantastical world of superheroes and epic action. Jones has worked on epic projects with visionary directors like Christopher Nolan and Michael Bay, propelling ambitious narratives like Inception, the Transformers franchise, and Black Panther into a mythic realm by blending CGI-enhanced vistas with raw physical space and pushing the boundaries of what real world locations can become. Jones has mapped fantasy worlds in Prague, Patagonia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Greece to seamlessly integrate ancient monuments, natural scenery and sleek modern features with blockbuster-scale action. THE HONOREES ARE… THE EVA MONLEY AWARD 2025 Director, writer, producer, actor KEVIN COSTNER accepted the LMGI EVA MONLEY AWARD, named in honor honor of pioneering location professional Eva Monley. Working with directors such as John Huston, David Lean, Otto Preminger and Steven Spielberg, she scouted some of the most unique and memorable points on the globe. From the windswept plains of Dances with Wolves to the dusty frontier of Yellowstone and the wide-open vistas of Horizon: American Saga, Costner has not only cemented a legacy as an award-winning marquee actor, director, writer and producer, but has also emerged as one of the industry's greatest Western iconographers and champions of location storytelling. In an age when technology can summon any setting the mind can fathom, he remains a devout preservationist of the dirt, sky and the stories told between them. Costner's prodigious talents broke onto the big screen in films like Silverado, The Untouchables and Field of Dreams, but it was 1990's gorgeous epic Dances with Wolves—which he directed, produced, and starred in—that would help revive the Western genre and become his filmmaking frontier. Costner's compass continues to point firmly west, spurring a cowboy revival on the small screen with his contributions to the Yellowstone series as both star and executive producer over five seasons, and on the big screen with his sprawling passion project, Horizon: American Saga, a serialized homage to the frontier mythos almost 20 years in the making. As its star, producer, writer and director, Costner scouted sun-scorched locations across Utah that evoke both the beauty and brutality of expansion-era America. The Location Managers Guild International proudly presents the Eva Monley Award to Kevin Costner for anchoring his work in emotionally resonant, physically rugged and mythically charged places, inviting us to experience that destiny across the vast landscape of the human spirit and the American West. EXCERPTS FROM KEVIN COSTNER'S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH It's an incredible honor to receive the Eva Monley Award from the Location Managers Guild International. You are the location professionals. You are the knowers and the keepers of the terrain who've helped me find the soul of where the story could live. Locations, to me, aren't just backdrops. They are characters and memories. Ghosts. They breathe life into the stories. They hold the wind, the dust, the silence. They carry the stories sometimes more than the dialogue itself. Eva Monley didn't just find locations. She uncovered cinematic truth, buried in landscapes. Her legacy is one of vision and bravery, and I'm honored to be part of a lineage that continues to uphold her standards. We all know that movies are 2% glamour, and the rest is hard, relentless work, and it starts the minute a movie is greenlit. It's the location manager and myself in a car, in a seemingly endless pursuit. We leave before it's light, we eat on the road and we return in the dark. You never give up. You never give in to the weather or the hours on the road. You are the unsung heroes who build the worlds that audiences can believe in. We need you to take us there and let the wonder of storytelling take over. Thank you again for this incredible honor. Kevin Costner