32
•
LMGI COMPASS
|
Winter 2026
Sacramento, the Big Bad
Sacramento, with its '70s/'80s-adjacent government core and
dense concrete, quickly became a foundational piece of the puzzle
with its brutalist architecture and vaguely out of time features. "It
was meant to kind of symbolize the establishment government as
the 'big bad,'" Glaser says.
Those towers and empty plazas become the stage for some of
the film's biggest early set pieces: Perfidia and her crew tearing
away from the bank, police cars threading through tight turns, car
wrecks and a helicopter shot looking straight down the canyon of
the street as the net closes around Perfidia herself.
It's a scale Anderson has rarely tackled in such a concentrated
way.
"Sometimes Paul doesn't want all of the craziness that comes
with scale," explains producer Sara Murphy. "Sometimes he
wants to roll up in a van with five guys, unload and, safely, just
roll camera. And so, some of that is I think where it gets tricky for
Michael and the team because then there are obviously sequences
in the film that we do need the infrastructure, like in Sacramento
when we're doing stunts and there're explosions and where we do
have to properly just take over a space."
"Taking over" meant closing routes onto major highways,
coordinating the helicopter over government buildings, and
staging a full-on stunt sequence in the middle of the downtown
core. So, the job wasn't just finding the streets; it was convincing
the city to let Anderson tear through them and then putting the
machinery in place without suffocating the nimble, run-and-gun
energy he wanted to preserve.
The balancing act that exists somewhere between careful
orchestration and creative spontaneity is why Murphy points to
communication as the real superpower of Glaser's crew.
"They have so many things that they are juggling all at one
time," Murphy says. "And I admire them greatly for the way they
handled everything on this shoot. I think communication is where
his team flourishes."
Sacramento Film Commissioner Jennifer West recalls that "it
was all very simple at the start, like on any project. They'd just
say, 'We're coming in to scout this area or look at this building,'
and I'd offer them some thoughts or connect them with someone
and then, one day, something made my ears sort of perk up and
I was like, 'I think we actually have to have a real conversation
about this. This seems a lot bigger than maybe you're letting on.
That's when they told me it was a Paul Thomas Anderson film, and
we started talking about the scale of it."
"Glaser and I went to a meeting that Jennifer set up with about
15 or so different people from the city and we talked about our
requests, road closures and how to reroute people and traffic,"
Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) meets
Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor)
