Winter 2019
AT WORK WITH
By Becca Nadler
1st AD Rebecca Strickland considers her job to be similar in some ways to customer service. "You have to be super patient [but] still strong to get done what you need to get done," she says. In other words, "You have to be able to dance with your director and DP."
Prepping and locations scouting with Matthew Weiner on Amazon's The Romanoffs—a show that filmed all over the world—was logistically challenging for Strickland. One episode involved a character embarking on a cruise, which meant filming on a real-life cruise ship in international waters. "We had to organize with the cruise company, figure out how to get everybody onto the ship—there was TSA, all this stuff," she explains.
Because the production wanted to film in the main atrium of the ship, they were only able to access it late at night. "We could take possession of the main area and we could shoot from 11:00 p.m. to like 6:30 in the morning," Strickland says. "I had to figure out how to—when we scheduled it, when we had day work to be done—make the clock work."
The globe-trotting continued throughout all of filming, says Strickland. "It's a lot of frequent flyer miles."