Rupert Bray - Location Manager

CV
Rupert Bray was in the military for eight years, 'a great grounding for thinking under pressure and dealing with people'. He left and became a runner on pop videos and commercials, graduating to the position of location manager's assistant on TV drama in 1997 and then location manager in 1999. The latest film he worked on was Beyond The Sea for Kevin Spacey.

What does a location manager do?
Find and then manage the locations. You usually have to find most of your locations within a 35 mile radius of where the production offices are. Beyond that you have to pay travel expenses and possibly overnights to the crew. Finding locations is the easy bit. Making them work is the hard bit: dealing with the police, councils, adapting locations to work within the budget.
On Beyond The Sea we were able to make Lulworth Cove look like Big Sur in California because the rock strata looked similar. Lulworth is an area of special scientific interest so we had to tread carefully, especially when we had to put a three tonne Silverstream caravan on the top of the cliff. In a location like this you might have to call in a helicopter or a crane, each job is different.

How do people contact you?
Almost entirely by word of mouth, there's very little cold calling in film. I'm hired by the producer/line producer and I tend to get involved early because the locations take time to set up and find.

How do you go about finding locations?
Obviously, the script tells you the type of thing you are looking for: a residential house, street, office etc. Then, the director with the designer give me more of a specific idea of what to look for. The whole process is subject to change, either from a change of approach to the look and feel of the film, or the particular character cast in the role. I do a lot of telephoning and research for most locations before jumping in the car. A lot is down to experience. I don't go looking in some areas of Clapham and Battersea in London, for example, because the streets are narrow, there's nowhere to park and they are under a flight path. In rural areas you tend to do more old fashioned scouting; if you are looking for a barn down the end of a track say, then I would look at the Ordinance Survey Map and try and find likely sites from that.

What happens next?
When it actually comes to the filming I will post letters through the doors of all homes and businesses about one week before, to let them know what is going on and to ask them to help us by parking slightly further away from their houses, so that we can park the technical vehicles. Typically, you will only hear from the malcontents rather than the majority who will be happy. Many locations are "cheated" either because a great interior doesn't always fit with the exterior, or it is simply not possible to film at the real thing. For example, if you want to film at a Premier League football ground you might not be able to, but you might be able to get into another more local stadium with similar seating and intersperse the footage with library footage of a real game and make it work that way.

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