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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40 • LMGI COMPASS | Winter 2026 do and what can't we do?'" Wesley's answer, more often than not, was that they could do it all. Throughout the entire shoot, from California to Texas, this was a hybrid of precision-permitting and opportunistic shooting that only works when a city and a Location Department share trust. "Honestly," says Glaser, "I would have slept more if I had known how accommodating El Paso was going to be with our eleventh hour requests." Downtown Baktan Cross begins to feel like a trap: a maze of brick, blinking neon, and bad decisions where Bob is always inches behind or ahead of the people trying to destroy his family. The scale never overwhelms the tension because the locations never feel like movie sets. They feel lived-in, messy, improvised. By the time Bob narrowly escapes town, the film has shifted yet again. El Paso has played a portal, a waystation on the road to reckoning. And that road is where the company headed next. On-the-Run in the 'River of Hills' and the California Desert After the refuge of the redwoods collapses, the film drops into the California desert, where the story's emotional and physical distances finally converge. The desert unit spanned the stretch from Anza-Borrego to the Arizona border, a region where paved roads dissolve into scrubland and where distance goes from metaphorical to punishingly literal. The extreme heat becomes its own form of pressure, the horizon a trap. It's not a place designed for people, much less a full shooting company. "It was the most elusive location," Glaser says. "We were trying to find the rebel basecamp where Perfidia is pregnant and shooting the machine gun. And then, also, this one scene where a handoff happens between two characters, as well as the end of the movie, and we didn't know exactly what that was yet." What eventually became the film's defining location, the "River of Hills," wasn't even on a scout list. It was a detour. A happy accident. "We were scouting and we popped out onto that road," Glaser says, describing a strip of desert highway that undulates like an endless series of blind crests, and Paul was like, "What is this road?" Anderson whipped out his cellphone and started shooting through the windshield, the phone perched on the dashboard. He asked Florencia to shoot out the back windows, and then he asked DP Michael Bauman to film Glaser, who was driving, through the rear-view mirror. A tight close-up on his eyes. And, suddenly, it all fell into place… "It was like you could see the lightbulb go on for Paul," says Glaser. That moment effectively wrote the ending Anderson had been searching for. "We knew that all of our participants were headed into the desert," said Anderson following a DGA screening, "and we knew that Bob was going to have to save the day in some way, but exactly how that would go down was still unclear to us. But you realized it's very scary to drive those hills because you're going 65 MPH, 75 MPH and you think there's no one around, but you're just blind coming up over these ridges. "As you hit the crest of each hill, you're absolutely at risk. An "The River of Hills" the Lockjaw meet up- Ocotillo Wells, greater Anza-Borrego Desert region