Before she directed a feature of her own, Paula González-Nasser spent years location scouting for shoots in New York City. It turned out to be a fortune job path below-the-line, as she was able to apply the relationships with people and locations to her personal work at 5th Floor Productions, a DIY group made up of mostly Florida State Alumni. 5th Floor has only gotten more ambitious, starting with short works in 2016 and moving on to making features like Justin Zuckerman’s miniDV manifesto Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater and Ryan Martin Brown’s comedy of pathetic masculinity Free Time. More recently, González-Nasser was able to transpose her experiences into her debut The Scout, a deceptively subtle film about the way modern labor separates workers from their connection with humanity.
The Scout stars Mimi Davila as the titular location scout Sofia, in a restrained and devastating performance mostly built around body language and quiet reactions, as she goes about trying to lock down a house for a TV pilot, gradually feeling the pile-up of stress from the other lonely people she interlopes into the lives of. Parking tickets stack up, voicemails from confused people whose doors she’s knocked on get angrier, and the few personal commitments she’s trying to keep are slipping away from her schedule. The Scout, while being a film about filmmaking, is much more of a film about survival in the contemporary working world — one where personal fulfillment is almost forgotten about entirely in the built-up stress of the day-to-day.
I caught up with Paula González-Nasser over Zoom after The Scout played at New/Next Film Festival.
You yourself worked as a location scout for a few years. Can you tell me a little about that?
I went to Florida State University and moved up to New York in 2016. I didn’t have any jobs, I didn’t really know anyone. My roommate at the time was a production assistant on Broad City and was like “Hey, a unit PA just quit, do you want to do this job?” I didn’t know what that was but I said, “Sure, I’ll do anything. I’m sure I can do it.” And it was the person who takes out the trash and cleans the bathrooms. First one there, last one out. I stuck through it, and our location manager kept bringing me on to different jobs, and later that year he said, “I noticed you like taking photos, would you wanna scout?” Thus began a seven-year scouting stint. It was the height of New York City comedy shows — Broad City, Search Party, High Maintenance, Mrs. Fletcher — I was just kind of going back-to-back.
On the side, you were doing 5th Floor Productions with some of your FSU cohort.
Through scouting we were able to build so many relationships with locations that we would shoot at for different personal projects we did with 5th Floor. Or, if not, I at least knew what things cost and what we could get away with with permitting and all that. And because I wasn’t on set as a scout, I wasn’t that drained and wanted to be on set in our own productions. We produced a bunch of little short films from 2016-2019, and then we did our first feature Yelling Fire in 2019, and then Free Time — which I fully produced — in 2021. I think doing those two films gave me the confidence to go, wait, I think I can see a model for this and do The Scout within the parameters of a 10-day shoot, small crew thing. But it ended up being a lot harder than the other two because this type of movie was a little different in its setup.
How so?
With Free Time, it was such a fun movie to work on in the way we shot it. Our DP Victor Ingles was really smart about how to use the camera. Even our coverage was from the same angles, just more punched in. It allowed us to move so quickly. We were doing 12, 13 pages a day. With The Scout, it’s a lot more composed, these sort of wide shots that require a lot of time — a lot of blocking, a lot of setup, and our coverage was more traditional where we had to move the camera and relight those specific shots. Trying to do the same amount of pages for that kind of shooting style was trickier. And we only had one day in each of these appointment scenes, so we just had to knock it all out because the locations were pretty expensive..
Did you have a hefty rehearsal process, then, to prep for this? Only shooting 10 days, that seems really tight.
We didn’t do any rehearsals for two reasons: one, our lead actress, Mimi [Davila], lives in LA and our casting process came together pretty close to the shoot, and she had this idea — which I thought was brilliant — which was she didn’t want to meet the actors for those scenes [of scouting people’s homes] so that there would be a real tension and awkwardness of trying to get to know each other. She didn’t want it to feel staged. I was a big fan of that also because we didn’t really have time to rehearse. I think it actually worked in our favor. There were a few scenes where I could feel both the actors were feeling each other out, and I think it lends itself to the naturalness of those scenes. In other cases. where there is more of an ensemble — there’s two scenes with more than two people — I would have loved to do more rehearsal, for sure.
There’s a palpable tension in those scenes where she goes into people’s houses that is almost scary — you’re in this stranger’s house and you don’t really know who they are or what they might want from you, and you’re entering in their life the goal of “I’m trying to get to use your home.”
It’s scary on both sides, right? Because what does this person want from me? Sometimes you understand the location owner — why is this girl here taking pictures of my house? Can I trust her? But you also feel for the scout: “This person could be anyone and no one knows I’m here. I just knocked on a door and they answered.”
It’s so interesting how the personal and professional life have to bleed together for the job. She’s using her own phone, she’s getting parking tickets on her own car. You’re pretty slow to play your hand about how lonely that can be.
I have mixed feelings sometimes about that sort of structure. When I was writing the script, I didn’t think something like this was sustainable, it doesn’t really hold the tension. It’s repetitive, and we’re seeing her in the same sort of setup. How does this build toward the end? I think it was watching The Meetings of Anna by Chantal Akerman that I was like, oh it’s possible, it just has to be very subtle and we have to believe that she’s absorbing this stress and the loneliness of these people so that in turn we can feel her loneliness. That was sort of a risk, and I wasn’t sure if it was going to work out. It’s because Mimi really knows how to do a lot with nothing [that it works]. You can just look at her eyes and process that there’s a lot going on when there’s nothing really happening on the surface.
You do this with your camera, as well. I think about the scene on the roof where they look down through a skylight into a bar. It’s so devastating.
That roof is the roof of the office where I used to work. When I first started writing the script, my job was as an office assistant. I would go out there and that’s an actual skylight looking into an actual bar. I remember eating lunch one day there and just being like, “I wish I could be one of those people right now having a nice time, and we’re stuck here at work.” Sometimes scouting bars at 8:00 PM, it’s like… everyone’s having a great time and you’re working.
These film shoots are these fleeting things — they invade people’s lives for just a minute. But as a film worker, it becomes your whole life and you have to live in it all the time.
You don’t realize the accumulation of how that stays with you in the moment, but sometimes shoots can be very heavy and traumatic. It’s stressful, but you gotta push through it. It reminds me of a casting director, too. They’re constantly looking for actors, they’re getting these audition tapes, they’re having these intimate conversations with actors who really want this part, and then they never see them again. Maybe they’ll see them in five years on another project, but that connection is sort of severed and you just move on. It’s very unnatural. It’s not a part of how we interact with people in our daily lives.
She’s driving around listening to all these angry voicemails that are like, “Fuck you, you don’t care about me! You don’t really want to use my house! Is the shoot happening or not?” You have to go into these spaces asking people for something whether or not you’re actually going to use it, and, yeah, it’s inhuman.
You’re like a business sales person trying to pretend this is an artistic endeavor, but no, you’re the broker between the production and real life. It’s very strange.
My main job is bartending, and it feels very similar in that way [to location scouting] to establish these temporary relationships. The role of scout seems a little bit more universal than maybe other roles on a film set, at least to me.
This might sound obvious now, but I didn’t realize that until after making the movie how other professions have a very similar thing — even a make-up artist is going around different places and having these very physical relationships with their clients, they talk for an hour, and then they’re gone forever. A bartender seems the same. I’m sure you’re listening to people’s lives, and you may see these people from time to time again, but for the most part they come in and come out and it’s out of your life.
I think if someone had told me I would make a movie about movies five years ago, I’d cringe. But I think because it’s much more about everyday relationships and disconnection, that was the angle that I was okay with. The thing that appealed to me about a location scout is that they’re a little removed from the process, but it still comments on this idea of working in a creative field without it being “on set,” which we tend to see in films about movies.
And it’s not necessarily about personal artistic fulfillment, it’s more about just trying to survive and get your job done day to day.
Exactly, yeah.
I want to wind back to talking about 5th Floor. I read that the model of everyone switching roles around comes from your program at FSU, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that.
The film program at Florida State does a really wonderful thing where everyone trades positions on each others’ films. The benefit is you learn how to be a sound recordist or you have to shoot a film even if you have no interest in being a DP. What that does is allow everyone to have an opportunity to direct — which I know in a lot of film programs is not the case, you have to specialize and pick pretty early on what you do.
The other benefit of that is that you also crew on the older classes’ films. Some people are making their thesis and very early on you’re working as a production assistant, learning from the older students who are a bit more established and have more interesting ideas as you’re still finding your voice. So you get exposed to all sorts of films. Some are slow and experimental, some are horror. You get to see how different people do things. That’s a great way in the real world to make movies and keep costs low. I’ll produce your film if you produce my film, and we can kind of trade positions that way. Ryan [Martin Brown] produced my movie, I produced his. Ryan produced Yelling Fire, Justin [Zuckerman] also produced Free Time. So we’re all sort of trading positions.
Your collaborators can know your voice sometimes better than you do. I feel like that’s the case with my DP Nicola [Newton] — she’s known me for 13 years, so she knows what things I like and appeal to me. There were times where we were planning the shots where she could point me in the right direction when I was doubting the shooting style. She would just remind me of the movies I liked and say, “No, it really works here. In Alice in the Cities they get away with this.”
Do you think the switching around of roles helps with burnout at all? At least from my experience, I have a lot of film school friends who have gone into the industry and started PA’ing, a lot of whom stopped making things after college.
That’s a great question because I do think a lot of our friends who went to film school stopped making stuff after graduating, too. They’ll work either in post or on set for a while and then get completely burnt out. [FSU’s method] does give you the flexibility to be, like, if I wanted to go into art PA’ing I could because I have experience doing that. It still contributes to the burnout — it’s the same kind of stress that’s adding on, but what I will say is that it lets you learn how to do things at a much smaller scale logistically if you do different positions, because you understand the challenges. I know the limitations that we have and therefore I know we’re not going to have transportation; it’s New York City, so we have to keep things small. If I had only done producing or only done AD’ing I wouldn’t know that necessarily. I’d be more green and optimistic about these bigger plans. So it doesn’t help with the burnout, but it does let you foresee and tackle the challenges that are going to come up. Everything that went wrong while we were producing Free Time, we were able to course correct for The Scout.
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