How-To Hollywood: Surviving on Location, Reputation Intact
Advice from producers, filmmakers and crew — including why set flings are a red line: ‘I don’t want any HR drama’
Welcome back to How-To Hollywood, an ongoing series where I solve the great issues surrounding the most labyrinthine and treacherous of industries. Previous how-to’s include how to ask a favor, make a friend and go to lunch.
It’s time for another round of survival guides to navigating some of the most perilous corners of today’s entertainment industry. This week, in honor of the coming Academy Awards, we focus on the skills you need to get through the increasingly difficult film world. (You can read past installments of our How-To Hollywood here.)
Today, we look at a skill that will be necessary for just about anyone who works in the film world: How to survive on location.
If you’re making a film, chances are nearly certain that you’ll be making it somewhere else — shoot days in L.A. during Q3 of last year were down 37 percent over five-year averages, according to FilmLA — and it’s quite likely that that somewhere else will be very, very far away. Spending weeks or months living in a distant land, working long hours in a company of mostly strangers, can be exciting, but it also carries some very particular perils and pitfalls.
Here is my guide to how to survive life on location, with insights from producers, filmmakers and crew on food, fun, debauchery and relationships — both collegial and romantic (“In the past, you could have a fun location crush, but now…”).
Location shoots compress everything: workdays, emotions, temptations and consequences. Away from home, with per diems in hand and normal guardrails removed, even experienced professionals can find themselves making choices that feel harmless in the moment — and look very different once the lights come up and everyone goes home. Hollywood history is littered with examples (many of which I’ll mention below) with practical advice from working pros on how to come back, reputation and career intact:
I. This Is Your Home, Not a Bacchanal
Arriving on location is exciting. You’re far away from the rules and restrictions of home. If you’re lucky, you’re in Sardinia and not Shreveport, but in any event, it feels a lot like summer camp — with assistants to coordinate everything and a per diem!
Except for one thing — at summer camp, you’re not working 12-hour shooting days. You don’t have to remember your lines, your job, the million little details of every production. Your career is not on the line.
And you don’t have to do all that for weeks on end.
A couple of wild nights and you might not make it to the end of the first week. A week or more weeks of hard partying and they’ll be Medevac-ing you with a tube in your arm, as no matter how distinguished you are in your field, you’ve become no use to anyone.
Keep it together and take it slow. This is a job, not a vacation, and there’s a reason they are paying you to be here.
Life on location doesn’t just test your stamina — it tests your judgment. The impulse to let go and run amok is enormous, and there are cautionary tales of sets spun out of control dating back decades. “The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam,” Francis Ford Coppola said after the Cannes Film Festival debut of Apocalypse Now in 1979. “We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and, little by little, we went insane.”
