Living in Los Angeles you get to witness quite a bit of filming, but I still get a thrill every time I see a neighborhood coffee shop I recognize in a shot on screen. It’s silly, but it feels like you’re sharing something with the characters. “I go there too!” I always want to yell at the screen. “Rashida Jones(‘s character) and I have so much in common!!”
Even more fun is watching an iconic location in a film or movie on screen and then later visiting the place where it took place. It eerily feels like you stepped right into the screen. Recently, my husband and I had family visiting, and they said the thing they wanted to do most in LA was visit the house from American Horror Story. I love American Horror Story, and had no idea that the terrifying house from season one was just a few minutes away from where we lived. They have some pretty ridiculous fencing going on because (you have to imagine) people are pretty annoying in their fandom. But just standing in front of the familiar house felt like we were in an episode. Like Jessica Lange was going to pop over at any second and give a fabulous monologue.
It’s become cliché at this point to point out that New York was the 5th Sex and the City girl (it has totally been satirized and made fun of when talking about RomComs). But it’s true. The city was so important to that series. You can’t have Sex and the City or Broad City for that matter without New York, just as you can’t have American Horror Story without that house.
Which is all to say that locations are often almost as important of a character as the actors on film. And with that in mind, Lonely Planet has just released a new book highlighting some of the most iconic movie and television locations in the world. In Film and Television Locations: A Spotter’s Guide, film critic, Laurence Phelan found over 100 epic settings where some of our favorite scenes took place. Then he collected them all in one book. You can’t think of Rocky without him running up and down those stairs, or Mad Max with the desert swirling around our heroes. They just don’t work without the characters interacting with their surroundings.
The new book not only contains the locations of these scenes (that you can visit yourself!) but also amazing anecdotes and stories about filming that were collected for this project. Check out some of the photos below and you get the book at Lonely Planet or Amazon.
Pan’s Labyrinth- Belchite, Zaragoza, Spain
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring- Fiordland National Park, New Zealand
La Dolce Vita-Trevi Fountain, Rome, Italy
The Talented Mr. Ripley- Ischia, Gulf of Naples, Italy
The Man with the Golden Gun-Khao Phing Kan, Thailand
The Goonies-Astoria, Oregon, USA
The Star Wars: The Force Awaken- Skellig Michael, County Kerry, Ireland
Apocalypse Now-Pagsanjan, Laguna, Luzon, Philippines
The Martian-Wadi Rum, Jordan
Mad Max 2-Silverton, New South Wales, Australia
Rocky-Philadelphia Art Museum, Pennsylvania, USA
Photographs reproduced with permission from Film and TV Locations: A Spotter’s Guide, © 2017 Lonely Planet
