Risky Business

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When a film or television studio plans to work abroad, chances are someone will end up talking to Chris Palmer. Over the last 20 years Palmer has consulted on more than 900 productions and traveled to nearly 70 countries, advising entertainment industry clients on production risks abroad. After spending several years working for insurance carriers and then a consulting company, he joined entertainment insurance broker Aon subsidiary Albert G. Ruben 11 years ago as director of risk control. In 2004 Palmer created the first Risks in Global Filmmaking Map, which gives every nation a risk rating based on factors including crime and corruption, terrorism, disease, medical care, and kidnapping and ransom threats. Palmer often goes on location with clients, helping secure the cast, crew and equipment against local risks and advising on stunt and special effects safety.



Question: Your firm is an insurance broker for the entertainment industry, but what’s your job description?



Answer:

My job is to help our clients identify and control risk, to look at anything that can impact the film or TV production and try to find ways to either eliminate or control those risks.



Q: Why did you decide to create this map?


A:

Whenever we’d have a client that was going overseas, thinking about going to country A, B or C, they’d want to know what the risks there were. I’d basically provide them information on the crime risks there, what kind of security they’re going to need, how good the medical care is, if there were certain diseases and what kind of shots they had to have. Are the hospitals of good enough quality or will they have to go somewhere else to get medical treatment? Are there issues with terrorism or kidnapping or political risk? It’s information we gathered for our clients in the past but it had never been put in a place where they’d kind of have a frame of reference. It actually came out of the political risk map that Aon does, Three years ago I said, “We ought to have a map like this for our clients, specific to what they’re doing.” So I took this information I’d been providing to clients and adapted it into a map format.



Q: How do your clients use the map?


A:

It gives filmmakers information in the planning stages. It doesn’t tell someone “Don’t go somewhere.” It’s really just designed to show that here are the risks if you do go there and to know that’s where we have to start getting additional information. What do we need to control those risks? How do we make it safer?



Q: How do you gather your information?


A:

I’m the constituent member for Aon to the Overseas Security Advisory Council, which is a group sponsored by the U.S. State Department. It’s designed to provide up-to-date security information to U.S. companies with a multinational presence. The State Department provides briefing information and they have research specialists on every region of the world that can give you very detailed information. That’s a major source of information. Also we get information from within the State Department itself; they have a consulate affairs unit. We also have a number of private intelligence sources that we use, like security companies.



Q: Do you have your own resources?


A:

We have, within Aon, a counterterrorism division, a political risk division, a kidnap and ransom division. We gather information from them as well and share it with each other. We also gather information on health issues from World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Crime information comes from all these sources, plus also local law enforcement. It’s really compiling this huge realm of data from all these different sources and pulling it all together into an overall risk rating for each one of these areas.



Q: How do you help filmmakers actually mitigate risks once they’re on location abroad?


A:

It’s a variety of things. We’ll look at what security precautions we’re going to take. How many security guards will we have? What’s their experience? What kind of hotels will we be using? We want to select a hotel that’s got good physical security. In some cases you want to select a place that’s guarded and gated. In other cases you want to make sure they have good lobby security. You want to look at the same thing for the facilities. Where’s the production office going to be? You want a place that’s physically secure. The soundstages, the warehouses, where you’re going to be building your equipment and working on your costumes we’ll look at all those things. We’ll go in and look at the physical (filming) location sometimes what risks are there? That’s why I spend a lot of my time on location.



Q: How often do you travel?


A:

I’m out of town about 100 to 120 days a year, usually a week or two to three weeks at a stretch.



Q: Do you come back from your trips and add what you’ve learned about a certain place to your database?


A:

Absolutely. Ev-ery time I go to a country we get more in-depth knowledge, or if we have a show that’s in a country they’ll call and say, “Oh we had this problem or that problem.” Or they’ll say, “This was very good, we found a hospital in such and such a town.” That’s great. We add that to the database.



Q: What factors pose the greatest risk to filmmakers globally?


A:

Statistically the most likely thing is that someone is going to get sick. It’s far more likely that you’re going to get a case of diarrhea than it is that you’ll get mugged, but if you look at what concerns people the most, the number one issue is terrorism. People are frightened of it. Ever since 9/11 it’s been in everyone’s consciousness. But for most film productions it’s an extreme rarity. In all the years we’ve been around we have never had a film production directly attacked by terrorists. After disease probably the next most likely issue is crime. The chances that you might have your pocket picked or your hotel room robbed or that you might be mugged those things can and do happen.



Q: So what about planning for medical care if someone does get sick or injured?


A:

In many countries if somebody gets seriously ill or injured, if the hospital doesn’t have the skills or the facilities to properly handle it, we’ve got to get that person to a good hospital and that may be many countries away. We were in a very small town in Southern Morocco (on the set of “Sahara”) that had a very good small hospital that could handle broken bones and do basic surgery but they couldn’t do really specialized medicine. So we put a medical evacuation plan in place. If someone needed treatment beyond what the hospital could do, they’d go to the hospital to get stabilized and then we would fly them to the hospital in Rabat (Morocco). We had our own medical team on location and a military helicopter ambulance that was provided to us by the Moroccan government.



Q: Did you end up having to use the helicopter during that shoot?


A:

We actually had two people injured in their off-time and we flew one to Rabat and one all the way to England. He needed to have microsurgery on his hand to repair some nerve damage. Both of them recovered completely. It was a plan we had to have and actually had to use in that case.



Q: Can you talk about moving the James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” out of Turkey?


A:

The terrorist groups that operate in Turkey had in the past studiously avoided attacking Western interests. They had focused on attacking military targets and judges and government officials and police stations. We received information that they had announced more or less that they planned to change that policy and that they were planning to attack a western target.



Q: What did you do then?


A

: We notified the production company and the studio and said, “Look, you guys would be a prime target for anyone who’s looking to get headlines and we don’t think it would necessarily be a good thing for you to film in Turkey on this occasion.” And they did in fact relocate the portion that would have been shot in Turkey to Spain. That was in the late ’90s and not long after that happened there was a major bombing that affected the British consulate in Turkey and killed the Chief Consul.



Q: What about corruption?


A:

You run into issues like that. There are certainly places in the world where there is corruption. Whether it’s government corruption or private individuals, you have to pay. That certainly does apply and that’s accepted practice: if you want a favor from a government official you need to do him a favor. Sometimes it’s explicit, sometimes it’s not. It’s a little different than the way we do it here, but in some cases you have to do it. It’s really kind of an accepted cost of doing business.



Q: Any interesting stories you can share?


A:

There was one show I was involved in that was in Eastern Europe. I’ll leave the show and the country nameless. They needed to rent a large SUV. Those vehicles are pretty rare in Eastern Europe. So they were asking around and were told to meet this guy in the lobby of this hotel and he’d arrange it for them. So into the bar comes the Russian Mafia don with a couple of big bodyguards. He said he wanted $100 a day in cash payable every Friday. An hour later here comes this big bodyguard and he’s got this little guy by the elbow. He walks him up to our table, nudges him, and the guy reaches into his pocket, takes out his keys and puts them on the table along with the papers for the car. We go out to the vehicle and there are groceries in the back. We didn’t know if this guy owed them money or what the deal was, but they had his vehicle for a few weeks, driving it around. The keys to the guy’s house were on the key ring.



Q: You’ve said you don’t tell clients they can’t go somewhere, but are there places that you strongly recommend against?


A:

There are countries where it would be very inadvisable to go. Obviously places like Somalia right now. Afghanistan. There are number of countries where there are active wars going on. You don’t go to Chechnya, but the Russians wouldn’t let you anyway. There are a number of countries in Africa that have continuing unrest. Certainly Sudan is not a good place to be right now. Ivory Coast is continuing to have problems.


Q: What about when a production chooses to go to a high-risk location?


A:

With the right precautions it can be done. I have a saying about what I do in terms of production safety: There are very few things you cannot do safely if you have enough time, talent and money. You have to have all of those. If you’re lacking in any of those three, there are going to be some things you’re not going to be able to do safely. And that’s really what it comes down to.



Q: As someone who’s spent most of his career working in insurance, how do you know so much about stunts and special effects?


A:

Over the last 20 years I’ve advised on over 900 film and television productions. A lot of it is seeing how it’s done, how it should be done. There is no school for this. It’s something you learn by experience, learn by doing. I’ve actually taught classes at the Director’s Guild. I’ve taught at the American Film Institute. I’ve done seminars at UCLA Film School, because this is such a narrow field and there are so few people that actually do this.



Q: Are there other people who do what you do?


A:

On the insurance brokerage side, there’s not. I have a colleague in our sports and recreation division who does the professional sports and he also has a background in film, which is useful. Then there are studio safety people, but it’s a very small group. We’re talking about maybe a dozen people in the United States. It’s a very small field. That’s why these training classes are so important, getting that knowledge out to more and more people.


Q: What’s the most important advice you give?


A:

I always tell people in the classes that I teach that the most important thing for you to do in terms of safety is to say, “Hold on just a second.” Most things go badly, where people get hurt or when a sequence goes sideways as we say, because not everyone was on the same page.


Q: What was the most memorable film you worked on?


A:

There’s been a lot of memorable experiences, but “Titanic” was incredible. I spent a lot of time on that film. I was going back and forth to Rosarito, Mexico for almost two years. That film broke new ground in so many areas. It was the largest water tank for filming ever constructed, and we had another indoor tank that was also the largest constructed. The ship was over 600 feet long, plus we had three deck levels that sank in the indoor tank that could be raised and lowered. I run out of superlatives on that film because there were so many incredible things.



Q: What are you most proud of?


A:

I’d have to say my track record. Over 900 productions and I’ve never had anyone seriously injured. I’m very, very proud of that. We’ve gone to some extraordinary places, done some very remarkable things and all come home in one piece to talk about it. My goal in my career is to keep that track record. I run into people all the time who say, “I’m just so glad you were there and we got through this and nobody got hurt.” And that’s a great feeling. It’s really a nice thing.



Chris Palmer



Title:

Director of Risk Control


Company:

Aon/Albert G. Ruben Insurance Services Inc.


Born:

December 1962; San Jose, Costa Rica


Education:

B.S. in Business Administration with a specialty in International Economics and Finance, Kennesaw State University, Georgia


Career Turning Point:

Moving to Los Angeles in late 1989 to become regional manager of a risk control consulting company


Most Admired Person:

Winston Churchill


Personal:

Single, lives in Glendale


Hobbies:

Golf, reading, camping

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