Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is set in Brooklyn, New Jersey and Boston, but it was filmed in Newark, Bayonne, Athens on the Hudson, Lexington, Virginia, and Naugatuck, Connecticut. Ray Ferrier tries to get his children to their mother as alien tripods rise around them.
The route follows the film's flight in story order and shows where each scene was actually shot, from the first tripod to the final reunion. Several stops are film stand-ins, so pins mark towns rather than exact addresses.
Napoleon Dynamite is set and was filmed in Preston, Idaho, from Preston High School and the Deseret Industries thrift shop to a chicken farm in Franklin and Lamont Reservoir.
Director Jared Hess shot his 2004 comedy in July 2003 in the town where he grew up. This route follows Napoleon, Kip and Uncle Rico through six places, from the school gym to the wedding. Some scenes were shot elsewhere in Idaho, and the guide gives only street-level addresses for a few spots.
Batman Begins was filmed on Iceland's Vatnajökull glacier, at Mentmore Towers and Cardington in England, and on the streets of Chicago, including Lower Wacker Drive and the Franklin Street Bridge. Gotham City is a patchwork of real places.
This route follows the story from the League of Shadows in "Bhutan" to Wayne Manor, the Tumbler chase and the Narrows, with the real site behind each scene.
50 First Dates is set and mostly filmed on Oʻahu, Hawaii: Henry Roth works at Sea Life Park, near Makapuʻu Point, and falls for Lucy Whitmore, who loses every day's memories overnight. Kāneʻohe Bay, Laie, Kualoa Ranch and Makapuʻu Point's lighthouse all appear.
The route follows Henry's courtship from the film's opening shot of the islet Mokoliʻi to a first kiss by the lighthouse. Some interiors, such as the walrus habitat, were shot in California, and the café's exact filming spot is uncertain.
The Outsiders takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film was shot on location there: at Circle Cinema, the Admiral Twin Drive-In and a house on North St. Louis Avenue that is now a museum. S. E. Hinton's story of the poorer Greasers and the affluent Socs follows Ponyboy Curtis from a movie-theater beating to a church fire and a final essay.
The route runs through the story in order: the cinema, the drive-in, the Curtis home, the Windrixville church that was filmed around Skiatook, and the school where Hinton wrote the book. The school is a traditional identification, and Windrixville is marked only by the town.
A dumped teenager from Ohio crosses Europe to find his German pen pal: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin and finally the Vatican. The joke is that nearly all of it was shot in one city, Prague, apart from a single beach scene in Rostock.
Each stop pairs the story city with the real place that played it, so you can see where the fiction and the film set part ways. Story cities are approximate; the Prague filming spots are exact.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles.
The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, but Hong Kong was the city that shaped him: a Nathan Road childhood, Wing Chun lessons with Ip Man, and the film studios that made him a star. This route follows his documented life and the places where his films and legacy meet.
It runs from a Kowloon flat and school days, through a surviving Enter the Dragon location and the hospital where he died, to the statue and museum that remember him. Where accounts differ, the stop says so.
Two love stories shot in guerrilla style across Hong Kong in 1994: a policeman who buys cans of pineapple while he waits for a month to end, and a girl at a fast-food counter who sneaks into a policeman's flat.
The route follows the plot from a Tsim Sha Tsui nightclub to a block of guesthouses, then across the harbour to Lan Kwai Fong and the Mid-Levels escalator, and ends at Kai Tak, the old airport in Fallen Angels. Chungking Express stops are filming sites; the Midnight Express pin is approximate.
Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes.
It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Studio Ghibli's worlds feel lived-in because Miyazaki went to look at real places: a Welsh mining museum for the village in Castle in the Sky, Visby for the town of Kiki's Delivery Service, the harbour of Tomonoura before Ponyo. Other links are only rumoured, and he has denied at least one, the town of Jiufen in Taiwan for Spirited Away.
This route follows eight films in release order, from 1986 to 2008, and pairs each with the real place reported as its inspiration. Only some of these identifications come from Miyazaki himself, so every stop says whose claim it is, and none of them is a filming location.
Where Gladiator was filmed: the Germania battle in a Surrey wood near Farnham, Maximus' farm in Tuscany's Val d'Orcia, the slave market at Ait Ben Haddou in Morocco and Rome's Colosseum rebuilt on Malta's Fort Ricasoli. In 180 AD the general Maximus refuses his loyalty to the new emperor Commodus, loses everything and fights his way back as a gladiator.
The route follows the shoot between January and May 1999: the Surrey wood where the Germania battle burned, the Val d'Orcia valley of Maximus' farm, the Moroccan ksar that played Zuccabar and the one-third Colosseum replica built on Malta's Fort Ricasoli — ending at the real Colosseum, where the story's final duel is set.
