There is a common confusion regarding the work of a location manager, as if they were merely aesthetic detectives who go for a stroll looking for pretty facades. The reality is much harsher: a location is useless if it is beautiful but cannot withstand the invasion of a 60-person crew, trucks, and generators. For Natalia Peña, Head of Locations for Que Se Acabe Todo, the craft begins long before the camera is turned on; it involves reading the script and translating words into spaces, ensuring not only that the place looks good, but that the film is physically possible.
For this reason, Natalia rejects improvisation. Her team performs scouting with professional cameras and lenses, composing the shots even before the director sets foot on set. In this role, the location manager acts almost like an editor of reality: they must find spaces that allow for technical and narrative choreography, architecturally joining what the script demands, and solving problems invisible to the public, such as where to hide the technical crew so as not to break the illusion.
It is a job of foresight where, as she herself states, “we take care of the future. If the location is not approved, if it is not negotiated, if it is not open on the day of filming, there is no movie.” Her success lies in managing that uncertainty so that, when the rest of the crew arrives, the stage seems to have always been there, waiting in silence for the story to happen.
Labyrinths and Closed Doors: The Architecture of a Film Without Cuts
In traditional cinema, the location is a deceptive backdrop: if the camera looks north, the technical crew takes refuge in the south. They cut, turn, and move. But in Que Se Acabe Todo, filmed as one grand sequence shot, that logic does not exist. The camera is a 360-degree eye. “We have no blind spots,” explains Natalia Peña, whose mission this time was not only to find aesthetic places, but strategic ones. The challenge was logistical: How to hide a crew and equipment within a scene without the camera giving them away?
For the department store offices, the team needed a labyrinth. Thanks to Esteban Ruiz, the production company’s lawyer, they reached a floor on Paseo Ahumada, where AdmiralOne currently operates. A central hall with interconnected offices allows for the circular and continuous flow that the film requires. “It is a perfect place… the camera enters through one door and connects with the other,” describes director Moisés Sepúlveda.
It was in that same building where Natalia, investigating floor by floor, opened a door and found an abandoned notary office, the ideal setting for SERNAC (National Consumer Service). “It was all dirty, dusty. I had it cleaned and an incredible location appeared, like new, which has never been filmed before,” she says. An ideal spot discovered just meters from the main set that solves a large part of the logistics.
But the locations in this film do not only resolve technical problems; they also narrate the economic rise and moral fall of its protagonist: María Angélica Zari. First, the precarity: an old house in Barrio Matta with the necessary depth for the camera angles. Then, the brutal contrast of the second house. “When they told me that María Angélica had a 180-degree change, I remembered a house from my archive,” Natalia relates. The chosen place is a monument to kitsch: synthetic leopard skins, out-of-place palm trees, and a marble bathroom that screams ostentation. “The change of that money is translated into the architecture,” she explains.
Beyond the locations and permits, for Peña this film has a moral purpose: to refresh the memory. The movie is not just about a financial scam, but about a Chilean idiosyncrasy where labor abuse and egocentrism are disguised as commitment. “It talks about how ‘putting on the team shirt’ means committing even when you step over another person,” she reflects. That is why, even if the doors close, the film must exist: so that the viewer looks into the mirror of the characters and identifies, uncomfortably, their own reflection on the screen.