Blade Runner: Los Angeles 2019 Filming Locations

The film opens with former blade runner Rick Deckard detained by Officer Gaff, who folds origami figures, and brought to his old supervisor, Bryant. The future police station is an office set built inside the vast concourse of Union Station, a 1939 Spanish Revival landmark on Alameda Street. It is still the largest passenger rail terminal in the western United States, so the building you see today is the real one behind the set.

The rainswept streets Deckard hunts through were not downtown at all. Photography began on 9 March 1981 and ran four months, and a Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank housed the 2019 Los Angeles street sets. The old gangster street, New York Street, was built in 1930 and was transformed with miles of neon and acres of glass. The studio runs a public tour that lets visitors glimpse the lot behind the scenes.

Visitor guidance: Visit through the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood; the street sets are not open to the public otherwise.

On the way to his apartment Deckard goes through the Second Street Tunnel, one of the film's listed locations. It runs 1,500 feet under downtown and is lined with glossy white tiles that bounce the film's lights and reflections. Construction began in 1916 and finished in 1924.

Deckard returns to his apartment, where Rachael is waiting, and the building outside is Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House on Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz, completed in 1925. A few storeys were added optically, and casts of its trademark concrete blocks were used to recreate the interior in the studio. The film was popular enough that the house is nicknamed the Blade Runner house.

In the finale replicant Roy chases Deckard through the building and onto the roof. It stands in for J. F. Sebastian's apartment and the climactic rooftop scene. Its atrium is lit by skylights, through which the film's blimp is seen, and open bird-cage elevators rise past wrought-iron grillwork to the fifth floor. Here Roy delivers the line about memories lost in time, like tears in rain.

Visitor guidance: Open daily at 304 South Broadway; casual visitors may go up to the first landing only.