Erica Stein: Filming in European Cities (Cornell University Press, 2025) is such an exciting contribution to our subfield of urban media studies, because it takes a natural intertwining of location and production studies in a new direction. There are some other studies of production labor and location, which you cite in the book, but your ethnographic interview method, your focus on a range of less commonly studied European cities (Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris), and your engagement with critical theory really sets this book apart. I was wondering if you could begin by saying a little bit about how the project came about in general. How did interviews with location scouts and other below-the-line labor become central to the project? And how did you choose the cities that would be the main case studies?
İpek Azime Çelik Rappas: In the beginning, I was really interested in how screen productions have an impact on gentrification in certain neighborhoods, especially the ways in which they increase the value of land and real estate. I soon realized that the increase in value doesn’t just happen in “good-looking” locations — Manhattan in Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004), for instance. The locations that many films, especially action movies, look for are what you might call “ugly” and cheap. These are the locations that the film crews can easily access, in terms of permits and affordability. They can shoot and get out quickly. They are also often vacant and can easily be shaped and reshaped by filming practices.
I was reading a lot of news about the appeal of affordable locations such as lower-income neighborhoods and post-industrial factories, and how film crews use these locations and eventually increase their value as cultural and creative sites. I realized that the film industry is among the first of the creative industries that actually go in and increase the value of sites that are considered to be out of economic value. But, if there is an increase of spatial value, where is this value extracted from? As a Marxist, I needed to figure this out: the value needs to come from somewhere.
So, I started talking to people who produce films and TV productions in these challenging sites and realized their work includes a lot of things. It includes dressing the sites to make them look better — for instance, if a performer has to dance in a former factory that is littered with glass or debris for a music video. What this means is that these difficult-to-work-in yet cheap locations create labor not only for the person who finds and manages them, but for all crew members, including art directors and actors. I talked to a variety of people, and realized just how wide a group of screen professionals location creates labor for. So, labor became a central issue in the book, and how location creates labor became the essential question.
My choice of the five cities — Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris — comes partly from previous fieldwork and previous interests. But I also realized how when people look at media production work, especially in Europe, they mainly focus on cities that attract transnational production, such as Prague or Budapest. But in cities where there’s a lot of local production, like Istanbul, where I’m from, I realized that there is a lot of invisible labor going on regarding locations because, without budgets for international production, there is a need to remain local. That is why I was interested in local labor markets, such as Athens, which is a very small film market with well-known global art films; Paris, a huge, but understudied film and television production market; and Belfast, a relative newcomer in the transnational media production market.
ES: Interesting. I think it is great to have that sense of how a project like this actually comes together, and sort of the process of discovery you go through as an author. I have two follow-up questions. The first one has to do with the idea of how labor is specified and defined. You have kind of pointed to this already, but throughout the book, you are very clear that you’re discussing the labor of location as opposed to location labor. I was wondering if you could say more about the differences between those two things and what phenomena the labor of location centers that cannot be addressed through location labor?
IACR: The way location labor is described is through location scouts and managers. These are people who read the script, find the locations, answer questions about logistics, permissions, etc. I tried instead to look at the labor that location generates, that is to say, the more invisible forms of labor. This is rather akin to domestic labor. When people come to a house and see it is clean, nice and neat, and if they’re not doing any of that housework, they think, “Oh! the house is clean and neat, and that’s just how it is”. However, if they would get into that work, they would realize how much work and effort it involves to keep a house tidy, neat, and aesthetically appealing.
Similarly, the more I learnt about different city locations, the more I realized that it is not only about finding the location; it is also about making it look nice and aesthetically appealing. Sometimes this involves art directors who have to get rid of certain things in the background, add other things in the foreground, and actors and actresses who have to work in certain locations that are not necessarily easy to get to. All this labor related to space is invisible. The labor of location also involves residents who appear in movies, or in the background, yet sometimes it is not their stories that are told. What I am trying to say is that there is a space in the background, and it is a very essential component of the film, and it just doesn’t “happen to be there”. It needs to be created, and this involves all sorts of labor.
ES: In your response, you talked a little bit about the work of residents, or even of residences and that they are also being transformed — or, that they are having people come into their neighborhood and make these changes. One of the examples of what on set labor looks like is keeping out residents, or managing the location itself. For me, that opens onto one of the things that I found most impressive about the book, which is that you are able to really concretize how production workers are both precariously employed and exposed to dangerous conditions on set on the one hand, yet on the other they are also performing labor that makes individual neighborhoods, as well as housing and affordability in various cities in general, more precarious for refugees, the poor, and increasingly the middle class. I personally find that it’s really difficult to show how subjects occupy these dual roles in complex systems, and you pull it off. Could you say a little bit more about that, but also could you talk about some choices that you made that enabled you to do that, or to clarify that for yourself?
IACR: One of the quotes I included in the conclusion really encapsulated this difficulty of both wanting to find challenging locations and yet knowing how this can be detrimental to residents of those locations. I was interviewing a French location scout in Paris. Because location scouts have to produce so many photographs in a day or two to share with producers, they have to go in and out of places, sometimes risky places, without permits. She was visibly anxious as she was telling me about this experience of scouting for a film that needed a location where undocumented refugees may hide. She went to visit a bunch of former warehouses, and as she was going in and out, and taking photographs, she was coming across traces of and belongings of people — maybe unhoused or undocumented people. Plus, the locations were in bad condition, so she was afraid she could fall through a gap on the floor. Nobody knew she was there, so she turned on the phone and talked to her partner, and turned her GPS on. Because she also saw the remnants of people’s belongings she was afraid. This experience really stayed with me, and I tried to unravel her emotions. On the one hand, her fear of being in this space and, how she was very conscious about potentially running into someone in this space and, on the other, being the enabler of a potential production in this space, which could displace unhoused or undocumented people.
So, I quickly realized that while screen workers are precarious themselves, they are also aware of the precarity that they might create. There is a layering of concerns here: you want to do your job and find the right place, and do it as quickly as possible. Then, although the film itself is quite progressive and is about refugees, there is a concern that the production conditions might actually be detrimental to the people the film is advocating for. Not everyone I talked to was aware of tensions like these, but most crew members were telling me, “Okay, in the name of art, what are we doing exactly?” And I do have to say that I don’t consider all residents in all neighborhoods as so precarious – some are really aware of the profit potential of a film crew being in the area. It really depends on which neighborhood, and how much people are able to defend their space and determine their own representation.
ES: One question I had is exactly to do with what you just mentioned, that in some instances residents aren’t as precarious, and are able to extract their own value from production. Several times in the book you mention that the value created in and through a location does not accrue to the workers. In some instances, like Belfast, it does not actually accrue to the local municipality either, or at least not as much as they would like it to. So, where does the value accrue? And how useful is it to ask that question given that you are also focusing on the circulation of value via the unfixing of place?
IACR: When I interviewed people in Belfast whose job it was to bring huge media productions like Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2019) to a city typically known for civil war and conflict, they were very proud. I have to acknowledge their labor, not only bringing in transnational production but also promoting local production. I understand their pride. But when you look at the figures, what is brought to the city is not really financial gain, it is reputation. This is what I was trying to say, and what other scholars, like Vicki Mayer, have found. In terms of where the money goes, that is mainly to international companies like Hilton Hotels, and other such chains. Local labor is mainly producing work for extras, or carpentry, which is also valuable – not all the labor in film work needs to be screenwriting or creative labor. What I am really against in this book is the discourse, and exaggeration, of how much economic value screen production produces. There is reputational value produced, so for instance in altering Belfast’s reputation from economically stagnant to much more fluid and mobile. And this is all happening within a very neoliberal transnational economy, so there is a “maybe not this one, but sometime in the future” feeling among the local workers who are passed over for larger roles on major productions. That’s why I talk about how transnational film productions promote a speculative temporality — this feeling in Belfast that eventually there will be great opportunities for screen labor just as there were many great shipbuilding jobs in the past.
ES: So, value has to circulate, it has to accrue, and it has a local impact but not necessarily in a way that matches screen commission or booster discourse. At the same time, the labor of location and the value it produces have a real, physical impact on and intervention into city spaces through construction. I want to come back to this idea for my last two questions. One thing I have been thinking about throughout our conversation and during my reading of the book is this idea of the cities as being in the background of films and series — things people don’t always focus on. Twenty-five, thirty years ago when people were starting to systematically study media in the context of cities, one of the clichés was that we wanted to look at media in which the city is not “just” a set, where it is doing something else. You turn that inside out, and in the last two chapters of the book, you explore the consequences of turning the city into a studio through the examples of Jaffa and Istanbul. What are the key conditions that you think make treating a city or neighborhood like a studio possible? And what does it mean to think about a city as a studio?
IACR: In Istanbul, the way a lot of production workers describe shooting movies and TV is like construction work. Everywhere in Istanbul, in many different neighborhoods, there is so much production that you really don’t know whether you are on the street or in a studio. It also comes from the feeling that in Istanbul buildings go up and come down very quickly. It is an incredibly fast-changing city, and this made me realize that media production workers who work here treat it like something they can destroy and rebuild. And yet there are still local permits required and residents may resist production. But there are other places where that’s not the case. For instance, in Syria about ten years ago there was a production made under the Assad regime where the government was taking over abandoned property and land, doing regeneration projects, and destroying people’s land titles and properties, and then encouraging filming in these spaces. In this context, the filming itself becomes part of the expropriation process.
There is the example of the Cannon Group Films in Jaffa, which is really interesting. Several well-known B-list action films of the ’80s and ’90s were shot there, like The Delta Force (1986). In a BBC documentary interview, the director Menahem Golan says that everyone was happy shooting in Jaffa, in Arab neighborhoods, because the production was paying them, even though they were literally blowing up buildings. There are quite a few scholars and filmmakers who explore The Cannon Group and the impact of these films. For instance, Kamal Aljafari, a Palestinian filmmaker, made a very interesting patchwork film out of these popular Cannon action movies, in which the main characters are edited out to focus on the Palestinian extras that are in the background. The irony that I also try to highlight in the book is that they were making anti-Arab movies in an Arab neighborhood. Maybe there was payment, although that is debatable. It is unlikely that there was local permission given for the production, and the narratives did not belong to the people who actually lived in that neighborhood. Yet, these are also the movies that, in a way, archive the neighborhood. These were the issues I wanted to explore through examples of Syria, Israel/Palestine, and Istanbul.
ES: Yes, and the examples that we were just talking about are older, but you also provide very contemporary ones. One that really struck with me the most was this story about Istanbul, where the production company decides that the most efficient way to operate is to also become a construction company to build or modify purpose-built or renovated locations, but then promptly goes bankrupt and does not pay anybody. It seems like all the phenomena you’re talking about are of a piece with, and in some cases are at the forefront of, the increasing precarity of ownership rights as regards the built environment, the ability of people to stay in place. I guess, what I am wondering, what are some implications of this treatment of the city as studio that you see? And are there trends you perceive that indicate where this is going?
IACR: The reason I focused on Europe, and a couple of European cities, is that there has been a huge increase in the number of productions in Europe, both in studio and on location productions. That is also why I focused on these particular cities where there is a lot of on-location production, which has a huge impact on cities, and on the environment. There is quite a lot of work on the environmental impact of filming, as well as sustainable film production and green filming. However, not many people talk about the fact that we should produce fewer movies, and this inspires how I end the book. Usually, we discuss slow food or slow fashion because these are well-known shapers of the environment, generators of pollution and so on. Film production’s impact on the environment, by comparison, is less well known, even as production increases by the day thanks to all these streaming platforms that we now have. I end the book with the claim that the practices of production need to be thought together with that of consumption. Sustainable production should be considered along with producing less, producing more ethically, more locally, with fewer carbon emissions. This would not mean less work for people in the industry, just less exploitation — better working conditions, better hours.
Also, for the spectator, why do we keep binge-watching for hours on end, or sometimes not knowing what to choose on Netflix so just picking something and binging for the sake of it? I like the idea of being more conscious about what we watch, just as we are becoming more conscious about what we eat and what we wear. This might not shift the industry, but it is still worth considering. This idea is also about connecting production studies to audience and labor studies; about interweaving different areas of film and media studies, to place in conversation different areas of thought, including sustainability, and ethical labor, representation and consumption.
ES: My last question was going to be about these points you raise in the conclusion and what some alternatives to treating the city as a studio might be. What are models of media interaction with urban space are there that don’t fall into this kind of treatment of property or treatment of ownership that you outline throughout the book? I think what you are describing points us away from just asking “what does a solution from inside the industry look like” toward “what is a solution that’s consonant with progressive and sustainable movements in other sectors, and how might that enable us to think about film differently as a labor practice and to reconsider our consumption patterns in relation to it?” So, I think what you just said is really helpful.
IACR: After I wrote the conclusion, I applied for a Volkswagen grant with the idea of bringing together ecological production, ethical labor, ethical representation, and slow spectatorship. I am currently working on this project with my colleague Sezen Kayhan in Germany, exploring green and sustainable production in connection with participatory visual storytelling, where people are involved in stories made about themselves. We are also getting together a group of scholars, especially focusing on audience studies, to think about how we can teach, and promote, slow spectatorship practices. And how can we involve municipalities and other institutions in these practices that can promote a more conscious slow production and spectatorship practice? So, we will see how that goes!
Erica Stein is Chair and Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College. Her research focuses on the spatial politics of alternative cinemas. She is the author of Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (SUNY Press 2021) and co-editor of Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022). In 2015, she co-founded Mediapolis with Brendan Kredell. She is currently working on a book about real estate and crime in film, video, and television.
İpek A. Çelik Rappas is Associate Professor of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University, Istanbul. She is the author of In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in European Media and Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025). Her research, supported by grants such as the ERC Advanced Grant WALLS2BRIDGES, focuses on the intersections of media, incarceration, race, and urban space. She investigates how carceral communities become media producers, and explores sustainable, non-extractivist modes of media production across Europe and Turkey.
