I often wonder why there isn’t more location shoots, especially for stuff like sci fi.
Do you have an alternate history story and you need a city that will look alien to US audiences while still being oddly familiar? Too many to pick from really.
I can’t imagine doing location shoots is THAT expensive.
Some good examples of this is Mexico City in Total Recall, and all the location shooting in the original Star Wars Trilogy.
I think its just a matter of where you live. For example I live in NYC., Brooklyn now. Just 2 months ago they shot for “person of intrest” a block away from here. I pass by a film crew about every 6 weeks, depending on what parts of the city I’m headed to. Now if I lived in Kalamazo I doubt i’d see, well any film crews ever.
Most movies are currently shot on location. Many of them make the location part of the plot, as Mission Impossible IV did for Moscow, Dubai, Mumbai, and Seattle. The new Ghost Rider was shot in Romania and Turkey.
Basically, movies with extremely large budgets are shot in well-known cities and movies with small budgets are shot in places that make it very cheap to shoot. Toronto and Vancouver have encouraged film crews to shoot there for years and probably a majority of films and television shows that are supposedly set in New York City are really shot in Canada.
Location shooting has a number of disadvantages as well. It’s simply more difficult to shoot scenes under real-world conditions of noise and variable light. Most if not all dialogue has to be looped in at the end to make it audible. Getting the permits to shoot in public can be problematic and people hate it when you close down streets and buildings. Language barriers are frustrating. If a city doesn’t have a tradition of filmmaking, getting technicians, props, costumes, and all the thousands of names that go onto the end of a movie can be impossible, at least of Hollywood quality.
And CGI has advanced so that building an otherworldly city is far easier than finding a strange city in a world of identical skyscrapers.
The Bardenas have been a popular location since the '60s, but they’re normally used for a movie’s whole exteriors, or the rest of the exteriors filmed in another nearby location; Moncayo, Tarazona, Artajona or Olite are all popular for filming crews and within driving distance. A large amount of American series and movies have several crews, involved in different locations; for European productions it seems more common to move whomever needs to be moved. Moving the named cast, crew… to one or two locations can be economically sound (and it is done often); moving everybody to twelve different places for a 1-2h product seems like it could be a logistic and economic nightmare.
A very good friend of mine does budgets for big Hollywood films.
Location shots can be wildly expensive, if you have to take the entire cast and crew. Air fare, rental cars and vans, housing, per diem, film permits - it all adds up really quickly. Plus some countries require hiring a certain percentage of locals, so that adds to casting and hiring and local attorney fees. Add in iffy weather conditions, political climate and local traditions and holidays, and it starts to become a really, really big deal. This is why even many big budget films will shoot in Eastern Europe or other out-of-the-way locations, instead of London, Paris, Rome, etc.
Sending a second film crew to film exteriors is often a much cheaper option - no actors, just a couple of people shooting the wide shots of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben or whatever famous landmark is necessary to set the scene, and then cut to an interior (filmed in California).
My friend’s job is quite interesting - he has been doing it so long, he can help a producer calculate almost down to the penny how much it would cost to film in Puerto Rico, Hungary and Poland, versus Italy, Vienna and Moscow. He also knows which countries offer financial incentives, how much, and what taxes are or are not included, how complicated it is to get visas, what local housing is available and lots of other variables many producers never think of in the beginning. I have heard him mention how some films get to the budget stage and are canceled or delayed or re-written.
Imagine again. It’s really, really expensive. See DMark’s explanation.