Elizabeth Banks preps talent for a scene.
PITCH PERFECT 2 RETURNS TO LOUISIANA STORY BY W. H. BOURNE PHOTOS COURTESY OF PITCH PERFECT 2/UNIVERSAL
Pitch Perfect 2 producer Scott Niemeyer (R) on the set.
T
he Pitch Perfect Team is back in Louisiana for the sequel, and no one could be happier than producer Scott Niemeyer. The New Orleans native who grew up in Algiers, went to Ben Franklin, and studied at Tulane’s AB Freeman School of Business still calls the city home even though he does have to commute between the Crescent City and Los Angeles.
“Besides the obvious tax credit benefit, I grew up in Louisiana so it’s near and dear to my heart so I’ve been trying to steer our projects here,” said Niemeyer. “The food, the culture, the music, the people are all great fringe benefits for working here. It’s a very culturally rich state so those moments when we find ourselves not working, which isn’t all that often, there’s a lot of food and history and culture to enjoy, and I think that’s one of the best bits of lagniappe; not all our crew know that word, but they’re learning some Louisiana lingo. We try and hire locally because there’s an additional benefit for it, but it was a bit difficult this time with the major studios shooting films each with $100 million plus budgets and prepping simultaneously that we were a bit short on options for certain crew positions. We did have to bring in some people from out of state, and that’s a good and a bad thing. It suggests that all the qualified Louisiana residents were booked on other shows; the bad thing is there are not enough local residents in the business that we can hire locally. The Baton Rouge crew has been
tapped for Fantastic Four, and you have a large portion of the New Orleans crew coming up and down on this freeway. So we do have a large Louisiana crew, we’ve just had to supplement it because everyone is working.” Cinematographer Jim Denault lives in California, but he is no stranger to Louisiana. Pitch Perfect 2 is the third movie he’s shot here in the past four years. “I shot Butter in Shreveport and The Campaign in New Orleans,” said Denault. “On Butter, we brought almost a whole crew in because there wasn’t one available locally. On The Campaign, we had a good percentage of the department heads that came from California. We have almost an entirely a local crew for Pitch Perfect 2. It’s working out great.” Both Niemeyer and Denault talked about the stage shortages due to the big Hollywood blockbuster films that were shooting in Louisiana while Pitch Perfect 2 was also lensing. “There’s not that many stages in Baton Rouge,” said Niemeyer. ISSUE SIX
LOUISIANA FILM & VIDEO MAGAZINE 13