In The Bourne Identity Jason Bourne wakes up on a park bench in Zurich, walks a snowy Zurich street, stares across at the Zurich bank that holds his safe deposit box and climbs down the outside of the Zurich consulate. Five addresses, and every one of them is in Prague. Films swap cities all the time, and once you know where to look, half the famous skylines in cinema turn out to be somebody else’s.
Here are ten cities that are not what they seem on screen, with the real addresses mapped by ShotHere, a site that tracks where films were actually shot.
1. Prague plays Zurich in The Bourne Identity (2002)
The producer, Patrick Crowley, explained the swap while the film was still new: Zurich looked dull on camera unless you stood far enough back to get the lake in the shot, and Prague had streets with more drama in them. Prague did not stop at Switzerland. A mill inside the city limits plays a farmhouse in the French countryside. Whether a camera ever rolled in Zurich at all is still unsettled. The full list of Prague addresses is on the Bourne Identity filming locations page.
2. Prague plays Vienna in Amadeus (1984)
Nearly twenty years earlier Prague had already done the same job for Vienna. By 1983 Vienna had neon at street level and prices to match. Prague still had run-down cobbled lanes in Malá Strana where the camera could turn a full circle and catch nothing modern, and it was several times cheaper than Vienna or Budapest. The executive producer, Michael Hausman, boiled it down to street lamps: put up period lanterns and you could start shooting. There is one exception. The theatre where Mozart conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni in 1787 plays itself, and it is in Prague, not Vienna. See where Amadeus was filmed.
3. Glasgow plays Edinburgh in Trainspotting (1996)
Trainspotting is the Edinburgh film, and Edinburgh is barely in it. The famous chase down Princes Street and on to Calton Road is real, and it covers three streets within 900 metres of each other. Looking back in 2017, the BFI put Edinburgh’s time on screen at about three minutes. Almost everything else is Glasgow. Danny Boyle told Empire that the Glasgow Film Fund had backed his previous film and the money came with an obligation to shoot the next one in the same city. The details are on the Trainspotting locations page.
4. Los Angeles plays nowhere in Se7en (1995)
This is the strangest swap on the list, because the city in Se7en has no name. Most of it was shot within a fifteen-minute walk in downtown Los Angeles, and the whole effort went into hiding that. The production designer, Arthur Max, had crews cover up signs in Spanish to keep the story off the West Coast. The location manager, Paul Hargrave, chose one block on South San Pedro Street for its bay windows, because anyone who knows downtown LA would look up and think San Francisco. For twenty years afterwards, film people kept asking him where it had been shot. Walk the route on Se7en filming locations.
5. Barcelona plays Paris in Perfume (2006)
The makers of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer searched for more than a year, through Croatia, France and the Czech Republic, for a street that could be 18th-century Paris. The real Paris was dropped because, as the cinematographer Frank Griebe put it, the city is completely different today. They found their street in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. The production designer, Uli Hanisch, asked for a week to dress it. Barcelona gave him a single night: in on Saturday evening, shoot at first light on Sunday, gone by Monday. More on where Perfume was filmed.
6. A Czech spa town plays Montenegro in Casino Royale (2006)
The casino in Casino Royale has two addresses. Its front is a spa house in Karlovy Vary that opened in 1895. The poker table where Bond plays Le Chiffre is 7,900 km away, in a hotel lobby in the Bahamas. The producers had looked at Trieste and the Croatian coast for their Montenegro and found no big hotels on wide boulevards, so the seaside town was assembled from a Czech spa and a small castle town nearby. The film’s Miami is a Prague runway in January. The full map is on Casino Royale filming locations.
7. Chicago plays Minneapolis, and Hong Kong plays Macau, in Contagion (2011)
Steven Soderbergh shot Contagion without a studio, and he has said the fun of the job is making one place look like another without anyone noticing. The family home in Minneapolis is on the North Shore of Chicago. The Macau casino is a boat: filming near a gaming floor in Macau is prohibited by law, so the casino was built inside the Jumbo Floating Restaurant in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Harbour. Details on the Contagion locations page.
8. Pittsburgh plays San Francisco in Pretty Woman (1990)
Vivian’s night at the opera in San Francisco never left the Los Angeles area, apart from its front door. The opera house facade is a museum in Pittsburgh, 3,500 km east, the rotunda behind it is in LA’s Exposition Park, and the balcony was built against a soundstage wall. Even the hotel is three separate buildings. See where Pretty Woman was filmed.
9. Ohio plays Maine in The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The film says Maine and means Ohio. Nearly all of it sits inside a box about 80 km across around Mansfield, and roughly nine tenths was shot at the Ohio State Reformatory, which the state had scheduled for demolition on the day the crew was due to start. The warden of the working prison next door credits the film with saving it. The one place far outside the box is the ending: the beach the story puts on the Pacific coast of Mexico is 3,070 km away in the Caribbean. Map on Shawshank Redemption filming locations.
10. Liverpool plays London, and the Wirral plays Paris, in Chariots of Fire (1981)
Chariots of Fire is set in a Cambridge college, on the Kent seaside and at the 1924 Paris Olympics, and filmed at none of them. The Olympic stadium is a municipal cinder track on the Wirral, Dover is a Mersey ferry terminal, and the London theatre where Harold Abrahams first sees Sybil Gordon is in Liverpool. The film even puts a caption reading Broadstairs, Kent over a shot of the Old Course at St Andrews, in Scotland. The race round Trinity’s Great Court was staged at Eton because Trinity said no. Full list on Chariots of Fire locations.
Why films keep doing this
Read the ten stories together and the same few reasons come up. Money: Prague was cheaper than Vienna, and Glasgow came with a film fund. Time: Vienna and Paris had moved on and no longer looked like themselves. Permission: Trinity College, Barcelona’s tourists and Macau’s gaming laws all said no. And sometimes the real city simply does not photograph as well as the stand-in. The result is a map where Zurich, Vienna and Montenegro are all in the Czech Republic, and the best way to visit a film city is often to go somewhere else entirely.
