I was watching John Wick: Chapter 2 tonight and there’s a scene where Wick is fighting Cassian on some steps in Rome. As the scene rolled on it looked really familiar, so I pulled up a photo from our trip to Rome 3 years ago and sure enough we climbed those stairs walking back from midnight gelato after dinner one night. It was even shot from exactly the same spot where I took my favorite photo from the evening.
So, when have you been watching a movie and spotted a location that you recognized? Sure there will be some obvious ones but the more obscure the better.
Several scenes in *Backdraft *(scenes taking place in an alderman’s office) were shot in the offices where I worked at that time.
At about that same point in time, a scene in The Fugitive, with Dr. Kimble (Harrison Ford) on a pay phone next to the L tracks in downtown Chicago, was shot across the river from those same offices.
The movie Doubt with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman takes place in a neighborhood close to my own in the Bronx. One scene was shot in the Parkchesterhousing development, an area I’m very familiar with.
I visited Devil’s Tower shortly after the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when some local buildings were still in the guise of the “decontamination camp” they appeared as in the movie.
I was in Los Angeles in December and made a special trip to find the Bradbury Building. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but the inside is gorgeous; a tall atrium with exposed ironwork and cage elevators. It’s been in dozens of movies and TV shows, and according to Wikipedia a couple comic books. A classic episode of The Outer Limits, “Demon With a Glass Hand” was shot there. When J.F. Sebastian takes Pris back to his apartment in Blade Runner, that was at the Bradbury. I saw the American remake of M a few months ago and there’s a long sequence where a gang is searching for a killer who’s hiding in a locked office on one of the upper floors. It’s instantly recognizable.
There’s a scene in WarGames where Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy are rushing to catch a ferry that was shot only a few miles from where I grew up.
Cambria County War Memorial in Johnstown, PA, where they filmed Slapshot. I attended many Johnstown Jets hockey games when I was living there and went down there to watch filming. I’ve also stood in many of the locations where they filmed All the Right Moves a few years later.
The Insider had scenes from downtown Louisville. I worked there at the time. It included the lobby where I worked.
I don’t live too far from a house that was in The Green Mile. I pass by it occasionally.
Part of the TV movie I Can Make You Love Me, (alt title Stalking Laura), with Brooke Shields and Richard Thomas, was shot in Topeka Kansas. In one scene, at the office park where Laura Black works, one can see over the building to the west, and recognize the Wal Mart(as it was then), with the red, blue, and yellow roof. Very distinctive.
In the TV movie Cross of Fire, the Kansas state capitol building stands in for that of Indiana. I know the angle the scene there was shot from
The opening scenes of Steve McQueen’s final movie (The Hunter) were filmed in the area where I spent the first 11 years of my life. LeVar Burton’s character was captured in the town where my dad & I got our haircuts after the local barber closed up shop. The billboards they drive by were along County Route 12 near where 12 intersects with State Route 17.
We moved away from the area 14 months before the movie was released.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on the boards before - and keeping with the stairway theme from the OP - but I live on the same block where the famous Laurel & Hardy short “The Music Box” was shot. I walk up and down those steps all the time.
In the film adaptation of The Road, there’s a scene where the two protagonists come across the steel skeleton frame of a ship that ran ashore on a beach. That wrecked boat is the Peter Iredale. When I saw the movie, I immediately recognized the ship because I’ve often visited the northern Oregon Coast.
There was an old Clint Eastwood movie with I think, George Kennedy, too. Filmed in Northern Nevada. Been all over that shit. One scene, they drive up a dirt road, and onto Kingsbury Grade. I know that road very well. Also, where they shot some guy on the bridge just prior. All in my wheelhouse.
I lived on Bainbridge Island, WA, where at least some parts of Five Easy Pieces were filmed. One restaurant claims to have been the locale for the “Hold it between your legs” scene, but I don’t see a resemblance.
Breach, the Chris Cooper movie about FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen, had some park and woodland scenes filmed near where I grew up in northern Virginia. The story said Vienna or Fairfax, but it kid of looked like Reston to me.
Every DC-based movie from the 80s and 90s has location shots in Adams-Morgan, 18th St and Columbia Rd. Many of these feature the exterior of Lautrec’s, a yellow brick restaurant with a Parisian man painted on the edifice. Across the street, there’s a bookstore–Idle Time Books–where Tom Cruise chats it up with a grizzled old newsie (DC has none of those) in A Few Good Men. I knew that bookstore pretty well.
Several years ago, on a trip to Seattle, friends took us out to Fort Worden on the Olympic peninsula. As we were driving through, I got this weird sense of deja vu. A few minutes later it finally hit me – it was where they filmed An Officer and a Gentleman. (So I guess mine is backwards… saw the movie first and found myself in the location later.)
I went on a work retreat to the Bahamas, then a few years later I saw the Atlantis Resort and the Ocean Club in the Daniel Craig Bond film “Casino Royale”.
A few years ago, I was watching the beginning of the movie “Police Academy” (the first one). There’s a scene where Steve Guttenberg is parking cars and I realised that the office building I was working in was built on that parking lot.
There are a number of other locations in Toronto that I have recognized in films:
In the movie “The Incredible Hulk”, the Hulk and the Abomination have a big fight in Harlem which was shot downtown on Yonge Street (with a very conspicuous shot of the strip club Zanzibar).
The movie “Suicide Squad” had a bunch of locations in different parts of Toronto. One time my wife and I were walking in front of the MaRS Centre and a whole row of military vehicles were parked on the street. I wasn’t sure what was going on until I noticed that the MaRS Centre was covered with fake bullet holes and a sign saying it was the “John F. Ostrander Federal Building”.
Lots of movies use the unusual-looking Roy Thomson Hall as a semi-futuristic shooting location. For instance, the recent TV show “The Boys” used computer graphics to turn it into the superheroes’ skyscraper headquarter. Also, my current office building was used for a bank robbery scene in the same show. I watched some of the filming from inside the building, which was kind of neat.
