A friend once took me to an amazing abandoned mental hospital to show it off as a potential location for a shoot. The greatest production designers in the world with millions of budget dollars could never have replicated what nature had so effortlessly created over decades of history and years of neglect.
We found our way into the building’s basement and I began to feel very nervous, not least of all because of the small space through which we crawled to enter the premises and the hundreds of exposed rusty nails protruding from the walls, but the fact that the building had been scheduled for demolition, and the many “Danger: Keep out” signs were clearly not decorations for Halloween.
My friend insisted we could, “Get in, shoot, and get out, and we’d be incredibly unlucky to have anything go wrong.” I disagreed with his choice of words. Being hit by a falling piano on a leisurely hike in the countryside is unlucky. Taking a crew into a dilapidated old building without a structural engineer’s approval, valid permits, and hefty public liability insurance is more like playing Russian roulette with a bazooka.
The tragic death of second camera assistant Sarah Jones of
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