LOCATION MNGT
Working with Showtime, Warner Bros, and other studios, Ryan Cook has to talk with cops, mobsters, and celebrities to make a creative project happen.
BOSTON, MA
Big budget films are a fascinating industry with an incredible amount of moving parts. We often assume the director is the creative mind behind those moving parts, but a critical position is the location manager who’s responsible to putting out fires, tempering personal requests, and the precarious nature of setting up a place for an army of actors, designers, gaffers, videographers, staff, and more.
Every story needs a setting, and without a location manager the film is essentially placeless. I sat down with film location manager Ryan Cook, who prefers to be called “Cookie”, to learn how critical place is to telling a story.
Cookie primarily works in the Boston area, where studios love to use the quaint, textured and claustrophobic feeling of the city.
Cookie worked as location scout with Warner Bros on the biopic of Whitey Bulger called “Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob”. Given the storyline the location of the film naturally needed to be in Boston. During the location scouting for the film, Cookie was exploring different parts of the city and seemed to find the perfect setting:
“The door just sort of creaks open a little bit. I just say hello? Behind a wall I see a scrawny pair of knuckles wave me in. He says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And I said ‘Nope’. [And he says] ‘I’m Frank Angiulo”.
Frank is one of the seven Angiulo Brothers, the rival gang that Whitey used his FBI protection to have arrested. Cookie quickly realized this was maybe “too ideal” of a location.
A big part of his job is scouting and Cookie spends most of his day driving around in an SUV talking to new people and building new relationships. He has to quickly explain who he is, and what he’s looking for. Often he does this without anyone to vouch for him.
Cookie’s lessons for creators is all about how to present and handle oneself in a strange situation. How do we talk to strangers? How do we put people at ease? And what’s the ideal location to do this in?
INTERVIEW
PODCAST
DISCUSSION
Every story has a setting. Cookie understands that place is many things: the look, the feel, the smell, the little pieces of implied history. “New condos are not interesting visually. This brick wall has crumbled slowly over the last 40 years and it has a texture.” (19:00) Being in an interesting space drives the emotions of the person speaking and the audience who is listening.
Q: What place will you transport your audience to in your pitch?
Putting faces in your pitch is mandatory, and it begins with your own. Whether getting a home owner or director to sign off on a location, Cookie has to pitch his ideas constantly. He explains his mindset, “It’s a weird thing when someone comes to your door and says hey can I photograph the entire inside of your house. The ability to put people at ease. And be like ‘Yes this is a real thing. This is a real request. Here’s who I am.’ [The] number one reason I have a picture on my IMDB page is they can have a face… and know that this is a real thing.”
Q: How will you put your face (and other’s faces) in your pitch?