Driving around Hollywood can be a surreal experience. As you wind through streets scattered with beautiful people and skyscraping palm trees, many of the film industry’s iconic landmarks seem to just appear out of nowhere. That unpredictable glamour is part of the city’s allure, and helped make our recent visit to the legendary Fox Studios to meet with 1992 Film graduate Steve Cainas all the more memorable.

After pulling through the studio’s front gates we were directed to Stage 21, the space where classic films like the original Planet of the Apes were filmed, and where Steve met up with us to talk about his decade-long career working as a production coordinator on television and film credits such as Lost, Sweet Home Alabama, The Ugly Truth, and his most recent project, the new Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz film Knight and Day.

“Being a production coordinator is the process of making sense of chaos during a film shoot,” he says. “I basically deal with the everyday logistics of a production. Handling the needs of the actors, their agents, and their schedules, and then securing the equipment, hiring the crew, and just making sure that the whole team is together throughout the life of the project. It’s been challenging, but if it wasn’t challenging it wouldn’t be fun.”

Knight and Day marks the largest project Steve has worked on in his 18-year career. Filming on the effects-heavy spy thriller lasted nearly eight months, and spanned multiple continents; the scale of the production meant Steve was in charge of everything from passports and travel arrangements for the cast and crew, to securing shooting permits and a staff of production coordinators across the globe.

“With this particular shoot, if I wasn’t seasoned before, I definitely would be now,” he says. “It’s been quite a journey, and a great ride. We shot in Boston for several months, then traveled to Austria, then Spain for the running of the bulls, then Jamaica, and Los Angeles. So it’s been a lot of work, and a lot of people involved to get it in the can. When you’re working on a project this big it takes a lot of mental strength to be able to keep up with it, but there’s such a big payoff when you see it all come together.”

Speaking with Steve about his work on the film quickly puts some perspective on everything that goes into getting a blockbuster to the screen. While he goes over the minutiae of securing a 767 cargo plane to ship 50 tons of lighting and camera equipment to Europe and back – let alone the logistics of transporting it to the shooting location – you quickly realize the thousands of things that are going on behind the scenes to create what you see in theaters.

“I think ‘adventure’ is the best way to describe what I do, because it’s pretty crazy sometimes,” he says. “We had this one incident in Spain where we had a corral with a hundred bulls that all escaped and went down into the streets of Seville – and everyone was running to escape from the bulls. You can only imagine answering that phone call the next day from the folks in Safety and Risk Management. But it’s those moments that make it interesting. It gives you an opportunity to do a lot of things that you normally wouldn’t be able to, and to be thrown into situations that you wouldn’t normally be in.”

The journey Steve undertook on Knight and Day has understandably elevated his professional career, as he was recently made a member of the Producer’s Guild, thanks to a relationship he made with Fox’s Vice President of Feature Production, Fred Baron – who personally inducted Steve in November 2009.

“Fred Baron has been an amazing mentor over the past year,” says Steve. “That’s certainly been a very exciting accomplishment, and I’m very flattered to be a part of [the Producer’s Guild]. It’s an opportunity to network and learn the craft from others that are in high roles. They have seminars throughout the year, and are part of the voting party for Best Picture. It’s something I’d never thought I’d have an opportunity to do, and I’m grateful to be a part of it.”

Even with all the success he’s had over nearly two decades in the industry, the friendships Steve have formed in the industry have helped keep him grounded. As we wrapped up our day on the Fox back lot, he stressed how lucky he feels to be able to collaborate with these artists on both sides of the camera lens, and admitted that he still has moments where he continues to be amazed by how far he’s come since his days as a film student.

“I laugh to myself wondering ‘How am I here?’,” he says. “Just driving into this lot every day, and seeing people like Tom Cruise on set – here I am with folks that have such amazing careers, and to be working with them and being part of that astonishes me, and makes me feel proud that I’ve taken the right steps to reach where I am.

“From Full Sail to where I’m at now, it’s been a journey. Back then I would have never guessed that I’d be where I am. I was a quiet, shy kid growing up, and I quickly learned to break out of that and be seen and heard. I’m happy to be really focused on what I’m doing in my career, and seeing it continue to grow. If you push far enough and are willing to take the steps you can get to where you want to go, it just takes a little work.”