There’s no shortage to American movies that are filmed in full or in part in other countries: at the theater now is Inglorious Basterds (Germany and France among other places) and the Nia Vardalos movie (if it’s still playing) filmed in Greece; Lost in Translation was filmed in Japan, The Godfather had big chunks of Sicily and Italy, etc., but they were all American movies due to mostly American casts/writers/producers/funding/perspective/etc…
What are examples of some movies filmed by non U.S. studios and primarily for non U.S. markets that were set in/filmed in the U.S.? I’d like to see some on DVD.
Leningrad Cowboys Go America. A Finnish film about a fictional Russian rock group (played by Finnish musicians) who, after failing to find an audience in their homeland, go to America because people “will listen to anything over there.”
Highway 61. A Canadian film about a mild-mannered barber who’s conned into accompanying a groupie and the body of her dead “brother” on a road trip down Hwy 61. Keep an eye out for a hilarious cameo by Jello Biafra playing an obnoxious US border guard. Also, the devil plays bingo is one of my all-time favourite movie scenes.
Paris, Texas, although the writers and much of the cast were Americans, it’s still a somewhat outsider perspective.
Also directed by Wim Wenders - The Million Dollar Hotel. Writing credits to Bono and Nicholas Klein, who I think is British. Actors a variety of European and American (Mel Gibson starred). Not sure about the production company.
I think some bits of Alice in the Cities might also have been filmed in the US; this and The American Friend make at least a few observations about America from a foreign perspective.
This could describe dozens of cheap Italian horror movies from the 70s and 80s. Two examples - The Gates of Hell (1981). and Inferno
There seem to be quite a few British semi-documentaries (e.g., Borat, and the films of Nick Broomfield) whose sole purpose is to travel the US finding Americans they can point and laugh at.
Well, I don’t know about “recommend,” but if you like B-movies, there’s Killer Condom. It’s a German movie set in New York about a gay tough-guy detective investigating a series of attacks in a seedy hotel.
There have been some movies about the Indian expat community in America; damned if I can remember any titles. In one of them, a boy’s family is trying to marry him off to a wildly unsuitable girl who tries to recite “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” in horribly accented English.
Some HK gangster movies have scenes in the States. Full Contact and A Better Tomorrow part 2 come to mind. I’m not sure if they were actually filmed here or if they were filmed in Asia with stock establishing shots of San Fransisco and New York city (respectively).
BTW, if you like action crime movies run don’t walk to see Full Contact.
How about I Spit on Your Grave? American cast, Connecticut locale, Israeli director. I think Meir Zarchi is a naturalized American, but this movie has a distinctively Old World vibe to it.
I assume that you mean the 1978 film called I Spit on Your Grave:
There are two other films that are called that. I would say that that’s an American film by most standards. It was filmed and set in the U.S. True, it had an Israeli director, but if having a foreign director by itself makes it a non-American film, then a lot of the classic Hollywood films would count as non-American. I’ve just done some searching and can’t figure out whether other aspects of the film are non-American. If it was produced by Israelis, written by an Israeli, cast mostly with Israeli actors, had a Israeli crew, and most of the pre-production and post-production was done in Israel, then I guess it should count as an Israeli film, even though it was shot in the U.S. Is that the case?
It is the 1978 one. The tone was very European, even if the cast and setting were American. The notion that a gang rape could be negated or balanced by acts of grisly revenge was very much not in the spirit of the time or place, and reminded me of a Sergio Leone western more than any American movie of the period, even Death Wish. It had the distinctive feeling of being dubbed from Italian or French, even though it wasn’t. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it just didn’t have the feel or pacing of an American movie.
In American movies, rape scenes are generally not filmed in such a way as to encourage the viewer to ogle the victim, whereas this was the raison d’etre of I Spit. It’s really quite a repellent film.