Hitchcock's North by Northwest starts at the Plaza Hotel and the United Nations in New York, rolls through Grand Central and Chicago's LaSalle Street Station, and ends on Mount Rushmore. Its crop-duster scene, set in Indiana, was filmed near Wasco, California.
An advertising man is mistaken for a spy who does not exist and has to run across the country. The route follows him stop by stop, from the Oak Room to the Chicago hotel where Hitchcock stayed, and says which scenes were real locations and which were sets or stand-ins.
From Russia with Love sends James Bond to Istanbul, onto the Orient Express and out to Venice, and it was filmed in the Grand Bazaar, the Basilica Cistern, Hagia Sophia and Sirkeci Terminal. The villains' island base was Pinewood Studios, and the speedboat chase was shot in Scotland.
The route follows the film from SPECTRE's lair through Istanbul's landmarks to the train, the chase in Scotland and the gondola finale. One caveat: the closing shot under the Bridge of Sighs is clearly rear projection.
GoldenEye is set in Arkhangelsk, Monte Carlo, London, St Petersburg and Cuba, but it was shot at the Contra Dam in Switzerland, the Casino de Monte-Carlo, Somerset House in London and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It was the film in which Brosnan replaced Timothy Dalton as Bond, and it borrowed real landmarks to stand in for the Soviet Union and Cuba.
The route follows the plot: the 1986 bungee jump, the casino and the stolen helicopter, MI6 headquarters, a "St Petersburg" that is partly London, the tank chase, the armoured train and the satellite dish finale. The Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020, so that last stop is a memory.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout was filmed across Paris, London, New Zealand and Norway, from the Grand Palais and St Paul's Cathedral to the cliff of Preikestolen. Ethan Hunt chases stolen plutonium cores through real streets, rooftops and a fjord-side dream.
The route follows the film's order: the Paris gala and convoy chase, the London rooftop run, then the "Kashmir" finale, shot near Queenstown and on Norway's Pulpit Rock. The HALO jump was filmed in Abu Dhabi, so it has no stop.
TBS's spy thriller VIVANT is set in the fictional Republic of Balka but was filmed in Mongolia, at Sükhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar and the Gobi's Bayanzag cliffs, then across Japan, from Kanda Myojin in Tokyo to Izumo Grand Shrine. Its Mongolian shoot alone ran two and a half months.
This route follows Nogi's story from Balka to Tokyo and back through Shimane, with stops in Mongolia and Japan. Some of the Japanese sets are offices and are not for visiting.
The Bourne Trilogy: Zurich's safe deposit box, the Paris car chase and Tangier's medina. A man with no memory is hunted by a CIA programme that wants him gone.
The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
Hill Valley is fictional, but almost all of it is Los Angeles. The 1985 film sends Marty McFly thirty years back to a small California town, and the filmmakers built its square on a studio backlot and dressed real malls, schools, churches and houses around the city as Hill Valley. This route follows the story from the Twin Pines Mall car park in City of Industry through 1955 and back to the McFly home in Arleta.
Each stop is a real place that played a piece of Hill Valley; the private homes are seen from the street only.
John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps sends Richard Hannay from a flat behind London's Langham Place onto the 7.10 from St Pancras and north to Galloway's Cairnsmore of Fleet and the spa town of Moffat, while a German spy ring hunts him. Hannay has three weeks to survive before he can warn the government. The title comes from a real stair in Broadstairs: 78 steps, not 39.
This is John Buchan's 1915 novel, not Hitchcock's very different film. London, St Pancras, Cairnsmore of Fleet and Moffat are named in the book; Hannay's hiding places on the moors and the Kent resort of Bradgate are not real, but the steps that gave the book its title are.
