The grueling Romanian shoot for Cold Mountain was made easier by the Italian grip crew, according to DP John Seale.

"The Italians" are a freelance coalition of Italian grips who previously helped Minghella and Seale shoot The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley in Europe, and worked on Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York shoot in Rome. Led by key grip Tommaso Mele, this group was crucial in every way to getting the job done in Romania, according to Seale, so much so that the DP even insisted on a guarantee he could hire Mele's team before agreeing to do the job.

"These guys are more than traditional grips, because they do things a bit different in certain parts of Europe," says Seale. "They basically are a group of guys who helped us get done whatever it was we needed to get done. We told them we needed a car in front of the house where we were shooting, and they didn't tell us the car was at base camp and it would be an hour. They had one there in a couple minutes. When I said I needed to shoot from a tower, Tommaso didn't scratch his head trying to find one and get it to our location. He went around the back of the house, and 20 minutes later, his team had erected a 20-foot tower. He had one lying back there in case we needed it."

Seale raves about this "self-contained lot," and says that when producers at first asked him why he cared which grip crew he hired, he responded by declaring, "I wouldn't make the film without them. They are the best grip crew I have ever seen in my life."