Film location scout Michael John Meehan looks back on risks, rewards of life in the movie business

Michael John Meehan wasn’t born here in Arizona, but it’s where he and his wife have settled after a career of traveling through over 40 different countries scouting locations for films like "Pirates of the Caribbean," "The Chronicles of Narnia," "Transformers," "Grease 2," "Outbreak" and "Witness."

Meehan is the winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Location Managers Guild International — they’ll be hosting their 12th annual awards gala this weekend.

Meehan recently told The Show more about the way he got started in the film business. He was 30 years old, feeling sort of adrift, and working as a delivery guy on a film set.

One day, he was dropping off some papers in an office, and he happened to walk in on a conversation between two executives. They were about to lose their location manager, and they needed a new guy. So they looked at him. And he’ll never forget what they said next.

Full conversation

MICHEAL JOHN MEEHAN: "Why don't you teach the kid?"

And I realized I was the kid, and of course he said he want to do it, and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, sure, what is it?

SAM DINGMAN: : And did they give you any training at all or or did they just kind of leave you there to figure out what needed to happen?

MEEHAN: Yep, yep, yep, that was it. My life sort of prepared me for this, for the circus.

DINGMAN: So talk a little bit about starting to get your sea legs.

MEEHAN: Sure, basically, like on a feature film, what I do is I'm hired either by the producer, studio, director. That's basically who hires any one of those combinations. Sometimes it's not a director on the project yet. I'm given a script. I usually meet with either the director or the producer or the studio heads, and they say, we are going to shoot this script, and we want to shoot these things practical, meaning on location.

So my job is to read that script and then think about a place where we could actually make the movie. Then I take that script, contact film commissioners, which every city and county in the United States, any major city, every state has a film commission.

DINGMAN: Right.

MEEHAN: So I call them and say, do you have a yadda yadda? Do you have a, yada yada yada, whatever. I go, I take my camera, I go look at downtown Phoenix, downtown Glendale, take pictures, talk to people. I think we could do this here. I think we could do this here, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then I take those pictures back to the studio, sit down with the production designer. So the production designer will sit and say, I like this. I like this. I don't, I'm about to get this. So he and I, or she and I, look at those projects, look at those places, excuse me, and then we'll go, let's show the director of these two, and let's not show him that.

Then the next step, once that is, is we arrange and fly, drive, whatever it takes. So then we all go.

DINGMAN: So when you go out on that initial drive with your camera, you know, just based on the script that you've read, what's going through your mind? I mean, do you have specific things you're looking for? Is it more of an instinct thing?

MEEHAN: It's both. I have to find the Amish farm, you know, for “Witness.” So I like riding around Lancashire, Pennsylvania. There's lots of Amish farms, that we can't shoot on an Amish one.

So I'm looking for something that looks like an Amish farm but isn't, which is always fun. And it has to be interesting, you know, a lot of Amish farms, not that you or your listeners would know, but you know, they're just farmland, you know, they're next to each other. You can see, you know, across the road it's flat fields. It's usually white or some sort of house, but they're not anything special. In fact, the very, very point of being Amish is not being special.

So I had to find in that case, something that was cinematically, oh wow, look at that, wow, look at that. And yet in a place that, as they say, is plain and simple.

DINGMAN: Interesting.

MEEHAN: And I did find a farm that was actually owned by Mennonites. Of course, now you got to convince the guy to do it. See, I thought when I saw the house, Sam, I thought, I will never ever find a better location than this.

DINGMAN: Yeah, so what do you say to him?

MEEHAN: Well, you just, you talk. One of the things you learn in my job is you, you understand how people frame things. If you don't understand that, you're dead. So I could understand how he framed his life as a farmer, and I had to try to figure out how to fit this whirling circus into that simple predictive pattern rhythm of his life.

So you get a feel for them, you'd sit and talk to them. I think they have to trust you, Sam. My job is to get along.

DINGMAN: So can I ask you, Michael, you mentioned earlier that you were sort of, that the nature of your life had made you well prepared for the circus of doing all of this. What did you mean by that? What was it about your childhood that you felt like prepared you for this kind of insanity all the time?

MEEHAN: I was born to a 17-year-old street urchin. Went into foster homes. And by the way, this all sounds much worse than I perceived it, but then I went into foster homes, and I kicked around there for a while. And then eventually my grandmother on my mother's side took me in. Now she was beyond poor. And she was fond of saying, I don't have a pot to piss in. ... We were poor.

And so from a very early age, 5 or 6, for crying out loud, Sam, I was always afraid I'd be homeless. You know, she was a woman of age, so I started working when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. I worked after school, and then what really changed my life in many ways was I decided for reasons of which I'm not totally sure, decided I wanted to go to UCLA. I had no money, and I'm in Delaware, 3,000 miles away.

DINGMAN: Now, did you pick UCLA because you wanted to be in movies and you knew it had a good reputation for that, or?

MEEHAN: No, I don't have a damn idea why I picked it. I could have been doing, if you watch football, you watch the Rose Bowl, they always say the same thing. Everybody back East is watching this going, why aren't we there? They're 70 degrees. They're in shirt sleeves, and I may have done it just for that reason.

So I, I did, I packed up everything, everything, which was nothing. And drove 3,000 miles, got off the freeway and got a newspaper and said, here we are, let's rock and us, let's do it.

DINGMAN: I'm tempted to make a connection there between, you know, the way you're talking about. Getting people to sign on to let their house be part of a film is, you know, you have to be sensitive to who they are and, and that relationship, but there's also a level at which it kind of has to work. It seems like that's a situation you were accustomed to putting yourself in is, this has to work.

MEEHAN: Yeah, yeah. I would say the first 30 years of my life were without a net. Five months into living in Los Angeles, but if I broke my arm, I would have starved. I'm kind of fearless about that stuff. Still am. Just do it. You just got to get in the car and do it. Let me break it down. I get in my car, I can do that. I can drive to California, I can do that. I can maybe find a place to stay. I can do that, and I break it down into pieces that I think, well, I can do that. I don't know about the whole thing. But I can do that and that's kind of how I get myself going, bit by bit.