Location, Location, Location

Plenty of films open with an establishing shot of a city's iconic skyline, or of a few iconic barns, only to go on and use the location as an anonymous backdrop. But few and far between are films that actually use the specificity that comes from location shooting to express something about the city's history, the characters, and the story itself. The cover story of our July/August issue is the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time—a New York film through and through—and in the same issue’s Art and Craft column, we asked veteran location manager Ken Lavet to reflect on the art of scouting for Steven Soderbergh and other filmmakers. "It always starts with the story—whether it's in a beat sheet form or a script or a treatment of some kind,” Lavet writes. “Hopefully I get some description from the screenwriter—of, say, a house, or an apartment building, or an office. And I start looking with that in mind." In this episode, Film Comment contributors Nick Pinkerton, Eric Hynes, and Margaret Barton-Fumo join Digital Producer Violet Lucca to discuss a film shot in their hometown, and access how each film interfaces with their lived experience of those places.