“I’m a location scout. After decades of making Toronto look like somewhere else, I’m keen to portray the city as itself”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to direct movies. When I read books as a kid, I would picture the characters’ gestures and movements along with their faces, their environments and how the light fell. Film felt like the closest art form to how life really was.

At 12, without telling my mother, I applied to study directing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London—I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of becoming the world’s first child director. (Of course, I was politely rejected.) Then I started secretly writing fan letters to legendary film critic Clyde Gilmour, and to my delight, he wrote back. In high school, I was a shutterbug, documenting everything around me and creating private narratives in my head.

By the ’90s, I was a bright-eyed, big-haired young adult rarely seen without my leather jacket, bouncing around the film industry from gig to gig. I worked as a researcher for Stornoway Communications, a coordinator for IMAX and a production assistant on the Leslie Nielsen movie Rent-a-Kid. One day on set, I was chatting with a location manager about my photography. He said I had a great eye, an important quality when it comes to translating a story into a visual format, and suggested I’d make a good location scout.

I signed on with the Ontario Film Development Corporation (now Ontario Creates), which was assembling crews for international productions, and quickly fell for the strange magic of the work: capturing the mood of a script through geography.

Toronto is a character actor with incredible range. It refuses to be typecast. The Bridle Path can play old-money grandeur; the east end does Boston beautifully; smaller cities with rural roads and clapboard houses, like Oakville and Pickering, pass for New England; and Hamilton can be dressed in a rust belt to play working-class America with ease. The adventures I’ve gone on in search of a backdrop sometimes feel as exciting as the movies they wound up in.

As a rookie scout, I knocked on doors across the city and left letters in hundreds of mailboxes. Being a small, disarming woman often worked in my favour. My managers would send me in because I was better at charming complete strangers than some of my gruff male counterparts.

One of my first assignments was scouting for Johnny Mnemonic, the 1995 Keanu Reeves sci-fi movie set in the then-futuristic year of 2021. I spent a long time poking around for possible locations—imagining a cyberpunk antihero tearing through Old City Hall—then put together a package of stills for how it could look. In the end, the production went with another location scout, but the Ontario Film Development Corporation liked my ideas, and the experience kick-started what would become a massive personal digital archive of locations, which I still use for just about every job today.

Those early gigs weren’t all charmed experiences. In the early 2000s, I was looking for a family home for the Canadian series Slings & Arrows when a man replied to a letter I had left in his mailbox. He offered to show me his mother’s house, but his mother wasn’t there. As I walked from room to room, taking in the architectural details and the decor, I could feel his eyes on me. Then he came up behind me and took a deep whiff of my hair. I was taken aback, so I spun around and asked what he thought he was doing. He laughed and asked what shampoo I used before taking another shameless sniff. I walked out before he could try for a third.

About five years later, I was scouting a tall red-brick building on Spadina, hoping that the rooftop could pass for something in Brooklyn. The janitor let me in and gave me free rein to inspect the roof while he went for lunch. As he left, the door blew shut behind him, locking me outside. I banged and banged to no avail, then flailed my arms at the surrounding glass buildings to get someone’s attention. It took about 45 minutes of rooftop charades before a neighbouring office worker came to my rescue.

Quentin Tarantino once said that, when people ask him if he went to film school, he says, “No, I went to films.” I studied the golden age of HBO, shows like Six Feet Under, The Wire and Mad Men, and tracked how the characters moved through space, where the camera sat, the lighting and how different styles of architecture could enhance the emotional quality of a scene.

In 2016, I worked on The Handmaid’s Tale, which needed to feel dark and oppressive. The team had a specific 19th-century Victorian mansion in Hamilton in mind for the commander’s house, draped in ivy and set behind a tightly manicured lawn. It has a looming, rather ominous energy. I spent days driving through Guelph, Cambridge and Toronto looking for ones just like it. At one point, I was scouting in the Annex when I got a call from production warning me not to knock on Margaret Atwood’s door—it would have been embarrassing for everyone if I’d pegged her house as befitting the dystopian and patriarchal land of Gilead.

Then I worked on Star Trek for three weeks, looking for exoplanetary landscapes. Sci-fi has its usual suspects—places like Presqu’ile Provincial Park, near Brighton, Ontario, where it looks as though you can walk on water—but I wanted to bring something fresher. So I drove to gravel pits, inactive construction sites and farms looking for seemingly alien landscapes. Audiences are smart—a poor excuse for a moon’s surface can bleed all the drama out of a good sci-fi story. I’d get out of my car and perform my own acting exercise, whispering, “Beam me up, Scotty.” If I didn’t feel transported, I’d move on.

The pandemic brought film and TV production to a brief halt, but by 2021, viewers were hungry for content and we were scrambling to meet demands. We worked in smaller, under-resourced teams, often on more than one production at a time. After that post-shutdown boom, I was burnt out and wanted a break.

Then, in 2022, I got a call from my location manager pitching me on an Elvis story that required locations across three decades. At first, I turned him down, but he persisted. A few days later, he texted me a string of smiling and exploding emojis. I realized that this wasn’t an ordinary job offer. He told me the director was Sofia Coppola and she needed my specialized knowledge of mid-century modern architecture for Priscilla. Burnt out or not, I couldn’t say no.

I’ve loved Coppola’s work since The Virgin Suicides came out in 1999. I always believed that we shared a visual sensibility—plus, she famously prefers to shoot on location rather than on a soundstage. For Priscilla, I disappeared into the deepest research dive of my career. I needed a Second World War–era military base and found the perfect dupe in a tiny Etobicoke subdivision, which became the film’s barracks.

When Coppola came to Toronto, she toured the options I’d put together along with the film’s technical department. My job was to stay one step ahead, anticipating every little detail she might be looking for.

I’m used to being ahead of the action, but on one of the last days of the shoot, I had the chance to be a part of it. Coppola’s brother, Roman Coppola, asked if I would assistant-direct the Las Vegas casino scene, which was filmed at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto, alongside him. It was a hectic day, but seeing it all come together—the set design, the costumes and the actors—was deeply fulfilling.

The Coppolas are a hard act to follow, but I’m at a stage in my career where I have the luxury of taking on only projects that excite me. I recently worked on Sian Heder’s Being Heumann, which will open TIFF in September. And I still dream of working with a bucket list of directors—including Sarah Polley for her emotional precision and Bong Joon Ho for his incisive use of architecture as a symbol for class.

These days, I’m finally finding time to write, direct and shoot my own projects. My short film DecayNation, about cities in ruin, premiered at the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto, then went on to play at festivals worldwide. I’m developing a Canada Council–funded TV series in which the main character has an alter-ego as a famous director—art imitating life. After spending decades making Toronto look like something it’s not, I’m keen to portray the city as itself.