RT’s Movie Location Guide – London as Elsewhere
Continuing our cinematic look at the capital - when has it played somewhere else
As we continue to celebrate the wealth of filmmaking past, present and future that has taken place in London, RT’s trip around the busy city goes on as we points you in the direction of some familiar locations from the annals of film history. Last week we looked at how the city itself had been represented on the big screen. This week, we explore London locations standing in for other places. Step into Gotham City, Vietnam and the planet Acheron with nothing more than a Zones 1-4 Travelcard. Follow in the footsteps of everyone from Christian Bale to King Philip of Spain as we take an eclectic look at 10 of London’s more memorable cinema backdrops.
For more locations like this, check out the interactive location map at the Industry Trust’s Connected to British Film and TV website.
Batman Begins
If you’ve a yen to visit Arkham Asylum, Gotham City’s repository for the criminally insane, you can find the exterior of the building used in Batman Begins is the National Centre for Medical Research (The Ridgeway), Burtonhole Lane (Mill Hill-ish), though the interior staircase where a SWAT team and a horde of bats attack rioters is one of the disused sections of St Pancras Station. There are other Gotham City locations — from Batman, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight — all around town — Commissioner Gordon’s police station, for example, is the Farmiloe Building, St John’s St, Clerkenwell. The Batcave (pictured) isn’t too far from the capital either – it was constructed on a soundstage at Shepperton Studios.
Eyes Wide Shut
Because he preferred to make films in England, Stanley Kubrick had many London locales dressed up with American fire hydrants and litter-bins to pass streets off as New York in Eyes Wide Shut. If you want to visit the Club Sonata, the after-hours jazz club where Nick Nightingale plays the piano, it’s Madame Jo-Jo’s in Soho. The final reconciliation between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman takes place in Hamley’s toy shop on Regent St. Somehow, it’s fitting that the last scene in Kubrick’s last film enabled him to have a whole toyshop for himself.
Full Metal Jacket
The burned-out ruins where the US Marines and the VC fight the Battle of Hue City in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket are Beckton Gasworks, which is also where Roger Moore drops the bald-man-who-contractually-isn’t-Blofeld into a chimney in the prologue of For Your Eyes Only and a stretch of blighted Airstrip One in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The firebase in Da Nang was shot in the Isle of Dogs.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Among the several offworld locations around the capital, the oddest might be Freemasons Hall, Great Queen Street W1 — which plays the temple of Humma Kuvala (John Malkovich) in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s among the most-filmed buildings in the city — as seen in The Saint, The Wings of the Dove, Miranda, I Capture the Castle, Johnny English, Sherlock Holmes and Basic Instinct 2.
Interview with the Vampire
In Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, immortal Brad Pitt can only experience sunrises by seeing them in the movies, and a century passes as he’s transfixed by Sunrise, Gone with the Wind and Superman. The cinema or cinemas, presumably in New Orleans, in the film is actually the Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
In an instance of location casting which would have affronted national sensibilities 450 years ago, the interior of Westminster Cathedral is passed off as the court of King Philip of Spain in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The Cathedral was also featured in another film its Royal heroine wouldn’t have approved of, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee — in which a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth arrives in punk-overrun London in 1977.
Entrapment
The climax of Entrapment finds Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones pulling off a high-tech heist in ‘the tallest building in the world’, which is supposedly a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur but actually the Lloyd’s Building, Lime Street, in Broadgate. It also features in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, Mike Figgis’s Code 46 and Tony Scott’s Spy Game.
Mission: Impossible
CIA HQ is famously in Langley, Virginia — except when Tom Cruise needs to break in to download a disc of vital intel in Mission: Impossible and reliable old County Hall on the South Bank fills in. The building also features in Frenzy and Scandal.
Spy Game
The regency curve of Chester Terrace in North London is seen frequently in films stressing the timeless elegance of London, from The Nanny through The End of the Affair to The Avengers. In Tony Scott’s Spy Game, this somehow passes for a region of Washington DC where the CIA have the office to which Robert Redford reports.
Aliens
The huge atmosphere processing plant of the planet Acheron in Aliens, where the colonists are overwhelmed by the aliens and the space marines have a hard time, is mostly the Acton Lane Power Station — which is also the Gotham City chemical company where Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson) falls into a vat of green goo in Batman only to emerge as the Joker.
For more locations like this, check out the interactive location map at the Industry Trust’s Connected to British Film and TV website.
