Paula González-Nasser has already proven herself to be one of the top location scouts for indie films such as Eliza Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” and beloved TV series like “High Maintenance” and “Search Party.” Now, González-Nasser is turning her experiences on set into a meta directorial debut with “The Scout.”
González-Nasser writes and directs the indie, which was funded by Fifth Floor Pictures, a community of filmmakers that collaborate on each other’s features. González-Nasser along with Ryan Martin Brown and Mathew Romanski are listed as producers.
“The Scout” centers on Sofia (Mimi Davila), who works as a location scout for a network TV show that shoots in New York City. The synopsis reads: “It’s her job to find the homes, businesses, and exteriors where the soon-to-be-shot show will take place. This means a daily journey into the private spaces and lives of numerous city residents, photographing their properties and briefly stepping into the fabric of their lives. Over the course of a day filled with these encounters, Sofia plays witness to moments of curiosity, vulnerability, and quiet tension, until her work takes a sudden, personal turn.” Sarah Herrman, Otmara Marrero, Matt Barats, Rutanya Alda, Max Rosen, and Ikechukwu Ufomadu co-star. “The Scout” premieres at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.
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González-Nasser told IndieWire that producing a trio of films in the summer of 2021 is what helped propel her to make her feature debut. (She produced short films “Weapons and Their Names” and “Prep,” as well as feature “Free Time.”)
“While I truly loved working as a location scout, it was a very demanding and challenging job, which made my daily life and schedule highly unpredictable. I was struggling to keep my creative side projects afloat and I knew that trying to do both was unmanageable for me,” González-Nasser said. “The itch of needing to make something of my own grew.”
She explained how eventually she “fell back in love with making movie with my friends” and how the “The Scout” came about as a fusion of this passion and her “funny, interesting, and sometimes scary” experiences searching for film locations. She started journaling about these moments, particularly during her time working for “High Maintenance” location manager Julie Sage. Eventually, she started to see how Sage would build a “beautiful relationship with the location owner (if all goes well, of course)” as terrific material for a feature.
She said, “Somewhere along the process of trying to write other ideas, I came back to those journal entries, and thought it would be interesting to make something out of those. I loved the concept of all these strangers in New York City being linked together by this central character that floats in and out of their lives, and I was also interested in the impact having all those interactions in a day takes on a person. There’s an emotional burden to the job that people don’t really think about, and it creates an interesting dichotomy — this scout having to take on so much from these other people through the job, but never having any time to process her own life because of the job.”
And it wasn’t just the premise of “High Maintenance” that inspired the perspective of “The Scout”: The series also helped hone González-Nasser’s own directing style and tone for the script. “Working on projects like ‘Search Party’ and ‘High Maintenance’ in particular informed my directing style tremendously, because I’ve always thought of myself and the stories I want to write as more dramatic-leaning, but I often find myself reworking scenes in rewrites to incorporate more situational humor,” she said. “I love working on comedy projects because often times the actors are comedians, and they understand timing so well — how to utilize a long pause, or how to keep a scene alive after many takes.”
“The Scout” is also thoroughly a New York film, and its debut at Tribeca is the perfect fit for the feature, according to González-Nasser. “Tribeca really champions New York stories, and I feel fortunate that this film will be experienced for the first time here in the city,” she said. “We made the film with and through our entire New York community, so to be able to share it with them here is so meaningful. It’s a film not just about New York City spaces but more so the idiosyncratic and complex people that inhabit these spaces. Every New Yorker knows that feeling of walking down a block they’ve been on hundreds of times before and looking at people’s homes and imagining what the lives of those strangers are like. At the risk of coming off cheekily, the film really became a capsule of the experiences I’ve had here in the last decade, getting to cross that threshold and meet all sorts of people who continue to inspire me and my work.”
“The Scout” premieres at Tribeca as a sales title with Cinetic. Check out the first look below.
