‘By Any Means’ movie turns 2025 Atlanta into 1966 Mississippi
Location scouts for films are always hunting for spaces that feel authentic.
That is especially tough when it’s a historical drama. For the civil rights era thriller “By Any Means,” location scouts last year had to find spaces in metro Atlanta that felt like 1966 Mississippi. The movie, which stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg, hit theaters this past weekend.
“While Atlanta is not 1960s Mississippi, you can find pockets where the old architecture remains,” said location manager Kyle Hinshaw, whose location credits include “Bad Boys for Life” and “Baby Driver.”
It wasn’t easy. Producers try to keep shoots within a 30-mile radius of downtown Atlanta. For anything farther out, crew has to be kept in hotels, per IATSE 479 union rules.
“I’ve been doing this 17 years, and I’ve seen rural areas getting gobbled up by warehouses and logistics centers,” Hinshaw said. “The sprawl is getting pushed further and further out.”
Dodd Vickers, supervising location scout for “By Any Means,” said home exteriors can often still pass for 1966, but era-appropriate interiors are increasingly rare because most homes have been renovated at some point over the past six decades.
For instance, countertops ― once laminate ― are now more likely to be made of granite or quartz. “A lot of times, we have to build interiors on a stage,” he said.
In “By Any Means,” Black special FBI agent Wayne Strider (Abdul-Mateen), based loosely on the real-life FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio, is forced to team up with Gregory Scarpa (Wahlberg), a white mafia hitman turned FBI informant, to find those responsible for the killing of civil rights leaders. Racial dynamics play heavily throughout the film.
A key scene featuring a cross burning created obstacles for the scouts, Hinshaw said.
The City Council in Newnan, for instance, turned down “By Any Means” in part because of that scene.
“I had to quickly pivot to other towns,” Hinshaw said. “We settled on Covington.”
Director Elegance Bratton said some citizens “were genuinely worried we might cause the Klan to come out for real. It was chaotic.”
In the end, the cross-burning scene was largely shot on a soundstage, with part of it in natural space in Covington. “We put our heads together and figured out a way to make it work,” Bratton said.
The movie filmed over a brisk six weeks in the spring of 2025. “We didn’t have the budget to build a lot of sets,” Bratton said. “We had to shoot in practical locations. We had to slice up the world but make it look expansive and large. You tilt the camera ever so slightly to the left, and there’s a McDonald’s, a check cashing place and a bank kiosk!”
Here are a few locations the scouts found for the film:
Town House Cafe, Covington
The two main characters have a pow wow at Town House Cafe in Covington, “a great little meat-and-three,” Hinshaw said,
A former schoolteacher opened the restaurant in 1964, and it has become a mainstay Covington eatery. Both the CW’s “The Vampire Diaries” and Tyler Perry’s 2008 drama “The Family That Preys” have shot there.
Bratton said he was surprised to see photographers and lookie-loos pop up outside the diner to try to capture Wahlberg and Abdul-Mateen in action. “That turned into paparazzi day,” he said. “It was my first day on set. We had a whole crowd of extras not dressed in period clothes!”
A pecan farm in Henry County
Giancarlo Esposito (“Breaking Bad”) plays civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, whose home in the movie was at a pecan farm in Henry County. His character was killed by the Ku Klux Klan for pushing the vote for Black people.
“The farm is relatively untouched, which is why it worked,” Hinshaw said.
Downtown Sharpsburg
The film needed a gun store that evoked rural mid-1960s. Vickers found a retail space used by a woman who teaches art. They split the space in half during production. “Kids were painting bunny heads next door to where we had this gun shop,” Hinshaw said.
Vickers said Sharpsburg’s shotgun-style storefronts “look exactly like they did in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” he said.
Lithonia neighborhood
A residence in Lithonia became the home of racist redneck Billy Roy Pitts and his menacing dog in the backyard.
“We didn’t have to do much because the woman who lived there hadn’t updated the place since it was built,” Hinshaw noted. “It was a great time capsule. There were a lot of period features on that house.”
A road near Emory University
“We needed to shoot a car sequence in town, and we found this quiet spot near Emory University,” Hinshaw said.
Cheshire Motor Inn, Atlanta
“By Any Means” last year was one of the last productions to use Cheshire Motor Inn, a Cheshire Bridge Road institution that looked like it never escaped the Elvis era.
The motel, located next to the Colonnade restaurant and known to be a popular spot in the gay community, opened in the late 1950s but closed last October after 70 years. By early 2026, it had been torn down.
“They were very cooperative,” Vickers said. “We changed out light fixtures and blinds, anything to make it feel vintage. We took down security cameras.”
Other films that used the motel included 2015 drama “A Walk in the Woods,” 2017 comedy thriller “American Made,” 2018 Clint Eastwood crime drama “The Mule,” 2020 Netflix movie “Hillbilly Elegy” and Apple TV’s 2023 comedy “The Family Plan” (which Wahlberg also starred in).
“By Any Means” also used Americas Best Value Inn in Conyers for another motel scene. Eagle eyes will recognize the motel as the temporary home of the Byrde family Season 1 of Netflix’s “Ozark.”
Other locations
Producers used Portertown, an old mill town east of Covington, for a late-night shoot.
And the FBI agent’s home was in a historically Black neighborhood near Cascade Heights, close to an actual house where Martin Luther King Jr. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee used to meet.
“It’s a cool neighborhood and historically significant,” Hinshaw said.
During its opening Labor Day weekend, “By Any Means” finished in fourth place with $9.3 million in box office gross behind “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “The Odyssey” and “Coyote vs. Acme.”
Critics were decidedly split on “By Any Means,” which is at 51% on the Rotten Tomatoes website, but viewers liked it more, giving the movie an 89% positive rating. People who rated the film for CinemaScore, which polls opening weekend attendees, gave the movie a solid B+.
Hinshaw saw the film opening weekend.
“Seeing it all stitched together in a narrative format, and with luscious noir lighting, I completely forgot I was watching environments that I brought to the screen,” he said. “I was moved that we were able to shoot in homes and neighborhoods where the civil rights was directly shaped.”