Matthew Patnick has a dream job. The producer and location manager for The Night Manager spent a year and a half travelling to and from Colombia to find the ideal settings to film the second series of the thriller starring Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, Hugh Laurie and Camila Morrone, which concludes on Sunday night.
When we speak, he’s in Liverpool on a job for an ITV drama. Not quite as glamorous (or warm) as South America, though Liverpool is lovely, he insists.
The Night Manager was filmed variously in Cartagena, Medellin, Spain, Tenerife, Oxfordshire and London. The team arrived at Colombia as the principal location via trips to Panama, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. Patnick admits the prep side to the job is pretty good and downtime in Colombia — including weekends on the beach in Cartagena during filming — were no hardship. Though the cast and crew didn’t really let their hair down until the wrap party in Casa Cruxada, a venue known for its music in the historic heart of Cartagena.
I can’t have been the only viewer to have enjoyed being transported to the warmth and vibrancy of Colombia in this horribly dank start to the year.
When Patnick received the script for this second series, it was set mostly in Bogota, the capital, which thanks to its high altitude (at 2,640m), is quite often enrobed in cloud and grey. I remember this from a previous trip — that and the fact that landing there is an ear-popping experience (it requires particular techniques from the pilot).
“We’d go to these incredible locations and would stand at the top of an office block, for example, and it looked superb,” Patnick tells me. But at ground level the city didn’t “deliver visually” what the show required.
Matthew Patnick on the set of The Night Manager
The cast and crew stayed in Medellin’s best hotel
When Patnick visited Medellin, the capital of Colombia’s Antioquia department in the northwest, he knew straight away it was something special — and would make the ideal contrast to Cartagena, where the Spanish influence is more visible, especially in the old centre. “Medellin just opened up this whole different world and we just looked at Colombia in a very different way,” he says. It’s a vibrant city keen to shake off its narco past and associations with the drug king Pablo Escobar. I liked the brilliant gondola system, opened in 2004, which connects the hillside neighbourhoods with the city centre and has been instrumental in cutting the city’s crime rates. And Plaza Botero, filled with the inflated-style sculptures by the country’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero. It has a thriving hotel and restaurant scene too.
The cast and crew stayed in one of the best hotels in the city, the five-star Elcielo, with slick wood veneer-walled suites and a spa (B&B doubles from £219; elcielohotel.com). Patnick is meticulous when it comes to selecting not just locations but the accommodation for everyone involved. “When you’re dealing with actors, you have to make sure… that they’re happy,” he says. “And I wouldn’t put the crew in a hotel that I wouldn’t stay in — it is important. When you’re away from home you want to be somewhere that’s safe and comfortable and feels like home.”
The gondola system in Medellin opened in 2004
ALAMY
When his wife came to visit — his rule is that he’s never apart from her for more than six weeks — they had a fantastic meal in the Elcielo Medellin Restaurant from the acclaimed chef Juan Manuel Barrientos (tasting menu from £139). There’s also an Italian, La Sere by Juanma, and a local-fare bistro. His wife got to see more of the city than he did, Patnick tells me.
Luxury hideouts, Richard Roper style
If you watched the first series you’ll remember the Mallorca villa of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie’s character), a beautiful converted fortress called La Fortaleza in Port de Pollensa, said to be Spain’s most expensive property and now a wedding venue (event rental from £520,310; alagoevents.com).
Roper’s Colombia hideout (a private house in Girardot, four hours from Bogota, which gave Patnick a spine-tingling sensation when he first saw it) was captivating for its remoteness, surrounded by jungle. Though, with its snakes, ticks, humidity and tricky access, the actual Colombian jungle was too challenging for filming, so some of those scenes were shot in the mountains of northern Tenerife, where they built a whole set. “There’s a different side to Tenerife that nobody’s aware of,” Patnick says. “It’s absolutely stunning… we would go up into the mountains, and it’d be like eight or nine degrees colder up there.” The Canary Island also doubled up as Syria in the opening episode.
The private house in Girardot used as the character Richard Roper’s Colombia hideout
MATTEW PARRICK
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Props to post-production for bringing it all together so seamlessly. Take the shipment scene in last week’s episode, which includes a drone shot of the real-life Cartagena port and then a subsequent sequence that was shot in Tenerife. You’d never know.
The desirable French retreat to which Colman’s character, Angela Burr, had semi-retired was actually in the Spanish Pyrenees. And Teddy’s glamorous charity party in episode two where the go-between character, Roxana Bolaños, played by Camila Morrone, appears in that fabulous red dress was shot in Barcelona’s naval college, Facultad de Nautica, in the Barceloneta district (fnb.upc.edu). Meanwhile, the conference centre attached to Barcelona’s Gran Melia hotel was where Pine’s character stays in Cartagena (B&B doubles from £207; melia.com).
The Gran Melia hotel’s outdoor pool in Barcelona
There is more visual trickery when it comes to the offices of the Night Owls (where Hiddleston’s character, Alex Goodwin, is working when viewers first meet him again). The exterior was shot in Holland Park, London, the interior in Barcelona.
With series three already in the works, does Patnick have any location requests? He’d love to go to Tokyo… or back to Cuba, he tells me. And, if he’s ever in London, he books a room at the art deco Beaumont, in Mayfair (B&B doubles from £510; thebeaumont.com).
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Patnick also recommends travelling with your own pillow. “You can stay in a bad hotel, but if you’ve got a good pillow, life’s so much more palatable,” he says. The ones at Bogota’s two luxurious Four Seasons hotels are so good, he bought one (B&B doubles from £360; fourseasons.com).
I think it’s safe to say that Hiddleston and co were in very good hands.
All episodes of both series are streaming on BBC iPlayer