Blessed art thou...

All location managers are saints. That is because without a shadow of a doubt, it is THE WORST job you can do in the film industry. I did it once, on a commercial. The brief was to find a traditional spit-on the-floor-pub complete with snug, tobacco-stained walls, shelves lined with bottles of ancient brews and photos galore of endless codgers who had worn holes in their suit trousers as they whiled their years away on bar stools slurping pints of Guinness and smoking 60 a day. Simple enough really. So, off I went and photographed a plethora of what I considered to be exactly what was required and then spent hours lovingly pasting the photos together on large sheets of cardboard to give the director a 360 degree view of each place. I knew the difficulty was going to be which one to choose as each sample fitted the brief perfectly. Turns out I knew nothing. They were all wrong. The reasons were given – a door was in the wrong place or too much daylight or the wood was too bright or the wood was too dark or look, these photos are just shite. And so, it went on and on for days, weeks – I thought it was never going to end. I also thought I was going to kill the director. I’m sweating even thinking of it again and may need to lie down in a darkened room the memory is so disturbing.

So, my attitude to Brendan, the location manager was suitably humble and thankful the first time we met. Thankful that someone (who had done the job before) had actually decided to do our film for a paltry wage not to mention the miniscule budget that he would have to secure 40 locations without any help from anyone. Privately, of course I assumed he was registered as mad because I could not think of one good reason why he would want to do this. Sensibly, I kept my mouth shut.

In a situation such as ours with a budget such as ours, we had to be extremely creative. We knew we would have to pull in as many favours from anyone we knew that had premises that could be commandeered. We needed a pub (eek), a penthouse, a warehouse, a building site, a plush boardroom, a house, another house, a third house, a park, loads of city streets, a posh restaurant, a not-so-posh restaurant, a café, about 8 different interview rooms, a house we could paint, a job centre, a union office, a dole office, an open-plan office floor, a tie shop, a double decker bus, more streets to drive it on, a conference centre, a couple of toilets, a bus stop and a garden shed……

So, where do you start when you have four weeks to find all of these places? Well, if you start thinking of the big picture and how impossibly difficult it all seems, that there’ll never be enough time to even photograph different places, not to mention getting the director and the DOP out to look at them and either approve or disapprove them nor having to then negotiate with the various location owners about the fee which you don’t really have in the first place…well, if you started doing that you’d never get the job done. The overwhelming pressure of it all would crush even the sturdiest of thick-skinned crazies who do this job and by all accounts, love it.

So, we started with Dave’s house. Dave lives with his Ma and they live in a small house in a well-established neighbourhood where everyone knows each other and there is a penchant for pebbledash. Dublin is awash with these sorts of communities so that description itself helped us narrow the potential for finding the perfect house down to about…two hundred thousand.

Brendan duly went and photographed a bunch of suitable houses and they were all good but, in true director form, there was something not quite right about them – I wasn’t excited by what I saw either inside or out. I had explained exactly what I had wanted and Brendan had found exactly what I described yet they were all wrong. I had become that director monster that I had wanted to throttle all those years ago. So, I went off and had a think. We had to find something more distinctive than pebbledash.

Now the corporate world that Dave was trying to get into is full of square buildings, with lots of glass and chrome and people in pressed suits and ironed ties and stripy shirts with sharp skirts. Lines, lines, lines. This was a cold place so Dave should be coming from somewhere totally opposite. Somewhere, that was warm and had curves and circles and lots of roundy bits. So I said this to Brendan and to his credit, he didn’t laugh in my face. Dave’s house was hardly going to be a circular house but his house could be situated in a circular environment, around a patch of circular grass. At some stage in Dublin’s past the town planners developed a taste for these sorts of estates. We whipped out a map and peered at the contents.  The circular ‘greens’ were easy to spot so Brendan duly motored to Crumlin when there seemed a selection of choices and started snapping his camera whilst I pondered the dozens of other places we had to find.

He came back with something promising and we went on our first recce. Nuria, the DOP came with us as there was no point in me choosing a place without her – would it be big enough for us to shoot in? Was there enough natural light? Where would we put her cappuccino machine? (In my experience, all DOPs come with personal coffee percolators)

We arrived at the location, which was perfectly situated around a manicured circle of juicy green grass. In fact, a boy was lolling in the middle of the grass holding a leading rein attached to which was a plump pieballed pony that I assumed was responsible for the manicuring.

We went into the house Brendan had photographed. I couldn’t believe it when I got into the sitting room.  Sometime in the past, someone had decided to open up the two downstairs rooms by knocking down the dividing wall and rather than putting your standard double doors between the rooms they had carved out a circle. No doors at all just a lovely big circle to walk through as the need took you. I don’t know whether Brendan had photographed all the houses until he came across this one but with Dave’s circular world in mind, we could not pass on this place. The vibe was perfect and Nuria was happy. We shook hands with the hapless location owner who had no idea what he was letting himself in for a left, very happy campers.

One down, only 39 to go.