It’s often said that the city a movie is set in is like a character in the story — think New York in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” or Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love.” But it takes a location scout to find the ordinary streets and houses that create a complete, lived-in picture of that place. This largely invisible but important role in moviemaking provides the lead character of “The Scout,” which premieres Thursday at the Tribeca Festival.
Paula González-Nasser wrote and directed “The Scout” after toiling as a location scout for around six years. The filmmaker, who grew up in Colombia and Miami, got into the business after moving to New York in 2016, when a scout left the show where she was a locations production assistant. What followed were busy stints on the shows “High Maintenance,” “Search Party,” “Broad City,” and films like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” — driving around, knocking on doors, and leaving fliers in neighborhoods in search of the perfect locations for scenes.
She started keeping a diary of her appointments, if only to preserve more of the memories of all that she saw. When the idea struck her to tell a story about her job through a movie, she knew she didn’t want to show the hustle-and-bustle on set that meta movies about filmmaking often focus their energies on.
“You never see the boring, drab, behind-the-scenes part of making a movie,” González-Nasser said during an interview in a cafe in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood where she had scouted locations for the HBO series “High Maintenance.”
“But,” she continued, “I also wanted to show a character in a job that was blending the personal and professional and pulling her in many different directions.”
The titular scout, Sofia (Mimi Davila), is shown walking up and down streets in Brooklyn and Manhattan, approaching homeowners and residents who may or may not want to talk to her, much less let her in.
Once inside, she has limited time to take photographs of the space for the filmmaking team to review, and usually has to chat with her temporary hosts, amiably enough for them to let her keep doing her job.
In both the film and in life, the process is part artistic research, part social engineering.
“It’s so heavy because one moment you’re just meeting a stranger and the next minute you’re in their bedroom and they’re telling you about their divorce or something,” González-Nasser recalled. (She clarified that the film was inspired by her experiences while scouting, but did not simply replicate them.)
People who allow their houses or apartments to be filmed are compensated, in amounts that can reach into the thousands of dollars per day for a big show like “Succession.” But the uninterested might push back against a scout, leaving annoyed voice mail messages in response to fliers left at their doors. González-Nasser remembered one miffed resident who attempted to flex by saying that he worked out with the former New York mayor Bill de Blasio; she left another brownstone in a hurry when one door opened to reveal a room containing dead birds.
But whatever form the encounters take, the goal remains the same: to gather materials for the vision that the filmmaker has conveyed. While in “The Scout,” Sofia is largely solo on her journeys, the movie also shows the interplay between her and the filmmaking team, as they explore one of the houses she has found. The job calls for presenting multiple options, and that’s true to the scouting process on a film, big or small.
“In the super early phases of scouting, you are usually scouting for the studios and producers on the project,” Anthony Pisani, the location manager on “A Complete Unknown,” wrote in an email. “In this early period, we scouts have more creative flexibility to build a foundation of a library to start with.” He added that, once that reference “library” of images is in hand, the location manager can then work with the production designer to find looks “more tailored to their design of the movie.”
Sofia goes through part of this process in “The Scout,” returning to an interior she has found with the director and his team for them mull it over. Their discussion ranges from personalizing the room more to the character whose home it will represent, to considerations that might not be readily apparent.
Last month, González-Nasser briefly revisited the location for this scene with a reporter, a sturdy multistory house in Crown Heights with a shaded front porch. She had first encountered it when working on “High Maintenance.” Standing inside to chat, the friendly owner explained that the house had been in her family for around half a century, and one could sense a welcoming aura to the living room even on the dim, overcast day.
That feeling of home plays perfectly against the scene where the Crown Heights house is used in “The Scout,” as the filmmaking team sounds increasingly impersonal discussing this personal space. But how exactly a location manager can grasp that sense of home-ness in unknown locations definitely makes the profession as much an art as a science. It is a matter of finding “some kind of magic,” said Jess Magee in a phone interview — herself a director who, like González-Nasser, logged years as a location scout.
“It could be invigorating and also really draining at the same time because you are going in and out of so many different spaces,” Magee, now developing her first feature to direct, said. The people could be an adventure, too, she said, remarking that “the whole span of humanity” was represented, among them “psychopaths, hoarders, priests, heiresses and wonderful people, lovely people.” It all became a bit too much: “It’s honestly why I had to stop scouting. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
That’s essentially the existential quandary that Sofia faces in “The Scout”: she moves in and out of people’s lives, with barely a moment to consider her own. González-Nasser said her producer described the film as “High Maintenance meets Chantal Akerman,” referring to the director of a key influence for the film, “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna,” which is about a woman whose job has her constantly on the move.
In the process of shooting, González-Nasser gleaned a perspective on the process. A scene in Sofia’s apartment, glimpsed at night in the beginning of the film, was in fact filmed in her own home.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, that would be fine,’” she said, “and I was so stressed!”
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