Toilet on Set – And Other Cross-Cultural Nightmares

There are many things you expect to deal with when working as a location scout and manager on a Hollywood-level production shooting abroad—language barriers, transportation logistics, weather surprises, weird local permits. But nothing, I repeat nothing, could’ve prepared me for the Great Swedish Outhouse Incident™.

I was hired on the American production of The Postcard Killings, a dark, gritty thriller based on a novel by James Patterson and Liza Marklund. The plot? A New York detective, Jacob Kanon (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan), goes full Liam Neeson after his daughter and son-in-law are brutally murdered on their honeymoon. More couples start showing up dead across Europe, all arranged in weird, artsy poses and foreshadowed by ominous postcards. It’s grim, it’s moody, it’s got serious crime in Europe vibes.

Now, one of those murder scenes was supposed to take place on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago. If you’ve never heard of it, imagine a picturesque IKEA catalog exploded into 30,000 islands. My job? Find the perfect one. No pressure.

After what felt like weeks of bouncing between boats, GPS coordinates, and seagulls with attitudes, I finally found it: a tiny, lonely island, just 150 meters across. One cabin, a couple of weathered sheds, and—here’s where the plot thickens—an outhouse. A real, old-school, don’t-breathe-through-your-nose, “hole in a bench” situation. Rustic charm, right?

I immediately flagged this with the American producer—a formidable woman who looked like she could crush a lighting rig with her bare hands. I gently suggested we bring in a porta-potty boat. Her response? “Didn’t you say the island already has a toilet?”
Me: “Well… it’s more of a, uh, Scandinavian open-air cultural experience.”
Her: “We’re not spending money on a toilet boat.”
End of discussion.

Fast forward to shoot day. The crew arrives, star power and all. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s hair is doing that perfect disheveled thing, the sky is cooperating, and everything’s going according to plan. For the first 30 minutes.

Then one of the American crew members pulls me aside and whispers, “Hey, where’s the restroom?”
I point toward the lonely little shack behind the bushes. “That’s it. There’s a latch on the inside. It’s… cozy.”

Three minutes later, he comes back looking like he’s seen the ghost of Ingmar Bergman. “That thing is terrifying,” he says. “Somebody already used it. It reeks. There’s no flush. No sink. I think I got… something… on my shoes.”

From that moment on, the outhouse was officially cursed. Nobody went near it. Word spread faster than a Netflix spoiler, and suddenly I had an entire Hollywood crew refusing to poop unless it was on solid, plumbing-equipped mainland.

So what did we do? We improvised. Every hour, we stopped filming, loaded people onto boats, and shipped them back to shore just to use a bathroom. That cute little “authentic Swedish island vibe” cost us over three hours of lost production time and roughly half the crew’s will to live.

Next time I’m scouting locations for an American crew? I’m either demanding a yacht with marble toilets, or I’m burning the outhouse in advance and blaming a wild animal. Skunk, raccoon, Midsommar cult—I don’t care. Never again.