‘We made the Maldives from a hotel in Heathrow airport’: Hollywood location scouts reveal their secrets

‘We made the Maldives from a hotel in Heathrow airport’: Hollywood location scouts reveal their secrets

Globe-trotting in search of picture-perfect scenes for the screen is not always as glamorous as it sounds. But to better understand these unsung heroes’ shadowy art, you first have to track them down …

The script called for a tree: a magical kind that looked like no tree on Earth. It would need to look like it had been standing for thousands of years. It would need to be in a wood full of dark twisty branches and dense canopies. It would need to seem like the place that a hardened nobleman might escape to for a moment of quiet. And Robert Boake knew just the one.

Boake had been working as a location scout in Northern Ireland for a few years, when in 2008 a producer sent him the script for the pilot episode of Game of Thrones. The producer “got me in my car exploring Ireland”, Boake explains, his excitement clear over the phone. “He said: ‘Go anywhere you want, and find me cool stuff and send it back to me.’ It was an unbelievable time of exploring and getting lost and photographing castles. There’s such an array of different looks. You’ve got Georgian stuff, Victorian stuff. You’ve got cliffs, you’ve got forests, you’ve got big open plains, big grasslands.”

Continue reading…

Please follow and like us:
Pin Share