Supervising Location Manager Duncan Broadfoot spoke with Lucasfilm about his work scouting the locations for the fifth Indiana Jones epic, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a journey that took him around the globe to find the perfect locations for Indy’s final adventure.
In the initial phase of his role as supervising location manager, Broadfoot oversaw a team of scouts in multiples countries, each helping to identify potential filming sites based on descriptions in the screenplay and on briefs from director James Mangold and production designer Adam Stockhausen. Where a typical Indy adventure already demands a large global search for distinct locales, Dial of Destiny faced additional challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Any travels in foreign countries resulted in weeks lost to quarantine,” explains Broadfoot. “Sometimes it’d be 10 days quarantine in the country and then ten days upon their return. So we tried a new remote scouting technology for the first time. Essentially, we had a team on the ground with an iPhone camera. The footage they captured went through an app and was beamed back to our control room in the UK, kind of like a broadcast scenario. Then that was fed into a Zoom call. The director in Los Angeles, the designer in New York, and the producers in London could be on the same call with a high-definition link to real-time footage of the location. They could speak to us and direct the camera around the location. We could even move between different countries and teams on the same call. We were limiting the traveling of the team so there was less exposure to COVID and less time in quarantine.”
Having narrowed down their selections, a small team would then visit the locations in person. “There is definitely value in being there in person to settle on what the final location is going to be,” says Broadfoot. “In every scenario, we established that we were in the right place and it was worth visiting. When we traveled there, we quite often wandered elsewhere and found other options as well.”
But there were other unique challenges. The film’s memorable tuk-tuk chase was initially slated for India. But when Broadfoot and others traveled to the cities Jaisalmer and Jaipur, “there was a terrible outbreak of Covid, and we had to leave the country and reevaluate,” as he explains. “Katmandu in Nepal was considered next, but then a similar Covid outbreak happened. Morocco came together very quickly after that.”
