DGA Monthly

Jonathan Filley interviewed by Richard Baratta UPM Jonathan Filley discusses the creative aspects of location management, and the qualities that translate from location management to unit production management. Filley on working with creative teams and their budgets: "Your Production Designer, your Costume Designer, and your DP are creative department heads, so they wear the Tefl on shield of being the creatives. I try to build their departments with people that I'm comfortable with. Very often in New York, you'll get a DP, a Production Designer, or a Costume Designer who's from out of town or from Europe, and you want to team them up with people you know and trust, that will service them to the best of their ability, but also give you a heads-up as to what's really going on. It's that fi ne line of creating a relationship with the creatives that they understand that you're not just about the bottom line. You are about the money, but you're about putting the money on the screen and not wasting it. Often when it's someone from out of town, there's a big learning curve to being in New York, so you really need to educate them as to how things work here. We work with good people. I always say, 'My job is not to save money, my job is to spend money wisely.'" DGA Podcast — 2026 Meet the Nominees: Theatrical Feature Film Listen to podcasts from this year's Meet the Nominees: Theatrical Feature Film symposium, as well as other Director Q&As online in the The Director's Cut section at www.dga.org/Craft/Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. View more excerpts and interviews in the Visual History Collection via the link on the homepage of www.dga.org. The DGA's Visual History Program website contains hundreds of hours of videotaped interviews with Directors and Director's team members discussing their careers and refl ections on all aspects of the creative process in fi lm, television and other media. These interviews are indexed for quick retrieval of segments pertaining to specifi c topics of interest within a particular interview or across the entire collection. Recent Visual History Additions Carol L. Green interviewed by Shawn Pipkin-West 1st AD Carol L. Green discusses her methodologies as a 1st AD, memorable moments working on features such as Steven Lisberger's Tron and Joe Dante's Gremlins, and how the evolution of technology has changed her work. Green on fi lming Gremlins: "I still get checks from Gremlins. I'm just like, 'Thank you DGA!' Looking back on it now, it's kind of cool. Who knew then that this is gonna be an iconic movie. I mean, it was just fun. We had different puppets for different shots. There was still some special effects that would happen in post, but a lot of puppetry and a lot of sets were built so that the puppeteers could be underneath the stage, on top of each other doing their controls. As Jim [Henson] said, 'You know, we're gonna have to be ready because at some point, we've got the storyboards, but if the Director says, "You know, I know I said in the storyboards where his head was gonna go this way, but we need his head to go this way," and then you just hear a lot of whispering and people run out to the truck for an hour and then everything comes to a grinding halt, so we don't want that to happen.' So, we really prepped on, 'What is plan B?' We talked to [SFX artist/Gremlins creator] Chris Walas a lot like, 'What can the puppets actually do? What are the limitations? What are the variations?' so that we kind of knew what we were dealing with."

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