What a Film Fixer Does: Local Crew, Permits and Production Support for Foreign Shoots in the UK
I recently spent a long day on a football pitch in Liverpool helping a French production company shoot a New Balance film with Everton's Tyler Dibling. If you don't work in production, "fixer" probably means nothing to you, or it sounds vaguely dodgy, like something from a heist film. So here's what it really is, using this job as the example.
When a foreign production company wants to film in the UK, they hit a wall almost immediately. They can fly in a director and a DOP, but they can't bring a country with them. They don't have a local crew, they don't own kit that's sitting in a van in Manchester, they can't legally rock up to a location and start filming without permits, and they have no idea where to get forty people fed by 6am. That's the gap a fixer fills. I'm the person on the ground who makes a shoot in a place you don't know feel like a shoot in a place you do.
This particular job came to me through Sovage TV, a Paris-based production company I've worked with several times now, including as a fixer on shoots for Dolce & Gabbana and The Body Shop. Sovage were themselves servicing their US partners, Stade, a New York production company, who had the New Balance brief. So it was a genuinely international chain: an American client, a French production company, and me sorting out Liverpool. That layering is normal in this work and it's part of why a local fixer matters. Nobody in that chain had filmed in Everton before.
The brief needed a football pitch, and ideally some recognisable bits of the Everton district to ground it locally. So the first job was the location scout. We found and photographed eight different pitches to offer up as options, plus a handful of iconic spots around the area, and put the lot in front of the production so they could choose with actual pictures rather than a vague promise.
Then comes the part people don't see and some foreign productions don't even realise they need: I arranged local UK insurance for the shoot and wrote the risk assessment. That last one matters more than it sounds. Some foreign companies simply don't produce one, and you can't get filming permits or hire most locations without it. No risk assessment, no permit, no shoot. So it's not paperwork for its own sake, it's the thing that unlocks everything else.
There's also a quieter reason a fixer is essential for crew and kit, and it comes down to trust and money. A local crew member or a kit hire won't take a booking direct from a production company they've never heard of in another country, because there's no realistic way for them to guarantee they'll get paid. So I take that risk on myself. I book them, I stand behind the payment, and they work with me because they know me and they know they'll be paid. That relationship is the actual product. You can't cold-email it into existence the week before a shoot.
Then there's Liverpool itself, which I say with real affection because my family roots are there. But it can be a challenge to film in. Scousers are curious and friendly, sometimes a bit too curious and friendly, and when you've got a professional footballer on an open location that turns into a genuine logistical issue. That's why we had security, and why local drivers who actually know the roads and the rat-runs are worth their weight, both for moving people efficiently and for getting talent in and out cleanly.
And then, because this is England, the day signed off in style. Torrential rain right near the end of filming, and we had to move fast to get cover sorted and protect both the kit and the shoot. You can't plan the weather away, but you can have the contacts and the kit to react in ten minutes instead of an hour.
The part of fixing I enjoy most, though, isn't logistics. It's the cultural translation. A foreign crew can Google a lot, but the web misses the nuances every time, the bit of local etiquette, the turn of phrase, the reason something that looks fine on paper won't fly here. A good example is the language. Even with fluent English speakers, a visiting crew will hear Scouse slang and local dialect fly past and have no idea what was just said, and they need an actual human to translate it, not a phone. Beyond the shoot itself I also end up being the unofficial guide to where to stay, eat, drink and unwind when the cameras are off. That's not a side task. A crew that's looked after works better.
That's the job. Not dodgy, not glamorous, mostly invisible when it's done well. Which is rather the point.
Crew
Director/DOP: Nicolas Babin
Producer: Aidan De Guzman
Art Director: Keggen Griffith
Photographer: Ethan White
Production: Sovage TV (France) for Stade (New York) | Client: New Balance