Panel: How a Place Becomes a Story — The Craft of Location Management

On 1 July 2026 - five days after this panel - Enola Holmes 3 premieres globally on Netflix. The film is set in Malta. It was shot in Malta. Its streets, its architecture, its harbours, its light are the world that Millie Bobby Brown’s detective navigates in what Netflix calls her most complex and dangerous case yet. Four location management professionals - including two who put Malta on that global screen - are in this room today.

The location manager is one of the screen industry’s most misunderstood roles. The end credits move fast. The job description sounds logistical. What it actually is - at the level practised by the people on this panel - is a creative act of the first order: the ability to read a script and understand what it needs physically, to know a territory so well that you can find within it the exact corner, the exact street, the exact quality of light that makes a fictional world feel real, and then to solve, with diplomacy and ingenuity, every practical problem that stands between that vision and the camera. The location manager is the person who finds the world the film lives in.

The three location managers on this panel have found worlds for some of the most watched films and series in the history of cinema. Tom Howard has turned the streets of Hull into Victorian London for Enola Holmes, scouted Malta for Enola Holmes 3, and built locations for The Night Manager, The Secret Garden, and a career’s worth of productions that required him to find places that had never been filmed before. John Rakich has spent 25 years as a Supervising Location Manager and Scout across studio and streaming productions including See (Apple TV+) and American Gods, and for five years led the Location Managers Guild International as its President - the institutional voice of the profession globally. Joseph Formosa Randon is the Maltese location professional who made Enola Holmes 3 possible from the ground up - the person who knows every street, every permission conversation, every logistical challenge that had to be solved for Malta to become the world the film required.

For Malta, this session is specifically timely. Enola Holmes 3 is the largest international production to have used Malta as its primary setting rather than its service backdrop. It arrives in the world on 1 July. What the Maltese screen industry - its producers, its film commission, its emerging location professionals, and its institutional stakeholders - needs to understand now is what that production required, what Malta offered that made it the right choice, what the experience of shooting here was like from inside the locations department, and what needs to be built to ensure that Enola Holmes 3 is the beginning of a pattern rather than an exceptional case.