The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

When circumstances preclude filming at a given building, it may be ‘played’ by another; a particular street can also be represented by one nearby. But sometimes a district, city or entire country have to be substituted for the scripted locale. To construct this level of illusion requires the mimicking not only of architectural style and materials but also road layout, topography, bridges and waterways.

An audacious Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill forms the central conceit of The Eagle Has Landed; following a betrayal, American forces are alerted and the attempt collapses into a pitched battle and siege at the heart of a village on the Norfolk coast. Filming, however, actually occurred in landlocked Oxfordshire, almost two hundred miles to the west, where the flint and patterned brick of Mapledurham’s buildings were a reasonable match for the East Anglian vernacular and the water mill, church and manor house the plot required were conveniently clustered and under the same ownership (a replica mill was in fact constructed adjacent to the original for the combat scenes). The location was also secluded, notwithstanding its closeness to the production’s London base at Twickenham Studios.

The challenge of simulating an urban environment can be met in several ways, as shown by two films set in the same city in different eras. To convey the deception of roguish Barry Lyndon taking a carriage through eighteenth century Berlin along what is implied to be Unter den Linden, filming took place in Park Sanssouci, Potsdam. Originally the grounds of the Neues Palais, the camera was positioned so that that villa was on one side of the shot and its Communs, or detached service complex, was on the other. Both were built in the florid Baroque style for Frederick the Great and so their projecting wings, porticos and external staircases appear as individual buildings lining the city’s principal street when seen at an angle. In The Blue Max, which follows a German pilot on the Western Front during the Great War, imperial Berlin is imitated by Dublin, a compact city with areas of well-preserved historic architecture. Some scenes were shot on the Irish capital’s streets, where the ornate covered bridge connecting Christ Church Cathedral to the Synod Hall across Winetavern Street suggests Germany’s Gothic architecture. Others were filmed in the grounds of Trinity College, whose main quadrangle with its central bell tower and enclosing Neoclassical buildings read as a town square when dressed and framed appropriately.

London might seem an unlikely candidate to duplicate New York, but diligent research has uncovered pockets of similarity. When the immortal antagonist of Highlander confronts his opponents in a Big Apple alleyway one night, the loft building that suffers from his destructive orgy was indeed a nineteenth century former industrial structure but one standing in Bermondsey, within London’s then derelict docklands. An abandoned warehouse due for demolition, it was close to the film studios – themselves established in an old factory – used by the production. Most of Bill Harford’s night-time walk of temptation and paranoia through Greenwich Village in Eyes Wide Shut employed an exterior set on the backlot at Pinewood, but several shots were obtained on real London streets whose building frontages had been carefully selected to correspond with the target city. Along Hatton Garden in Holborn and Worship Street further east in Shoreditch signs, road markings and items of street furniture were disguised, removed or covered, with American versions added in their stead.

New York has also been emulated by American cities. The principal location for Escape from New York, in which Manhattan Island has become a walled maximum security prison, was another city on another river almost a thousand miles distant: St Louis, Missouri. Given its troubled recent history – widespread damage to the downtown area after a major fire, closure of the railway station and one of its theatres – this was perhaps fitting. A corner site with extended vistas provided a suitable place for Air Force One to crash, the Grand Hall of the then deserted Union Station was the Duke’s lair and the New Masonic Temple became the New York Public Library. Even St Louis’ Chain of Rocks bridge was exploited, as the fictional 69th Street Bridge.

Washington, DC attracts political drama on screen as well as off but security, logistics and cost considerations have meant it too has attracted impersonators. The car and helicopter chase in Die Hard 4.0/Live Free or Die Hard was staged on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, with the camera kept low to conceal the absence of the capital’s distinctive governmental architecture. It was the turn of Cleveland, Ohio for equivalent sequences in Captain America: The Winter Soldier; its rooftops, roads and freeway overpasses are the background for car and foot pursuits involving the principals. For obvious reasons the real White House was off limits to the makers of Olympus Has Fallen, and so ‘flats’ of its lower floors only were erected on open ground in Shreveport, Louisiana with the remainder of the residence along with its proper setting – including trees, neighbouring buildings, even lampposts – supplied by computer-generated imagery.

Both New York and Washington, DC were planned on a grid, as was the centre of Philadelphia where the opening scenes of the apocalyptic action film World War Z are set. They were not, however, shot there or in another American city but in Glasgow, chosen for its architecture, wide roads and, yes, its own grid layout, a rarity in the Old World. George Square resembled corresponding spaces in Philly and enabled mass panic to be choreographed effectively and photographed from the air, whilst the surrounding streets are lined with closely-packed, large and consistently-sized buildings that could be extended upward through more CGI.

Changing countries is axiomatic when the setting of a film or scene is a danger zone, as with thirty years of dramas concerning the Middle East. The western United States – principally Arizona and some areas of California – offers the safest if less topographically correct option for such productions; rather closer to the objective, Spain has proven more suitable, replacing for example Beirut in Navy SEALS. It is Morocco that has become the most representative destination, though, a very specific heritage – incorporating many cultures from the area – allowing its architecture and settlements to replace Libya in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Somalia in Black Hawk Down and Iraq in Green Zone. With even greater proximity to Saddam Hussein’s former fiefdom, Jordan was used for The Hurt Locker – its director returned to that country to make Zero Dark Thirty, where it stood in for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The sands can shift, though. Saudi Arabia was once perceived as friendly to the West but after 9/11 The Kingdom had to be filmed not in the state where it is set and after which it is titled but in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The Soviet-Afghan War forms the background to Rambo III and The Beast/The Beast of War, made contemporaneously with that conflict, so both were shot in Israel. Yet by the time of the aforementioned World War Z with its key Jerusalem sequence, that country was itself passed over as a location in favour of Malta.

If film frequently conjures architectural deceptions, these must be the grandest. Even they must be grounded in realpolitik, however.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

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