Filming Locations Map: 24 Maps of Movie Sets and TV Towns
Cinema since 1911, Middle-earth, Albuquerque, Hawkins, Twin Peaks, Bond, Godzilla's Tokyo, Iverson's rocks, Ghibli's towns and 13,178 K-drama spots.
Updated
The largest filming locations map on MapIndex holds 13,178 places from Korean dramas,
films and variety shows; the broadest pins 7,868 scenes in 131 countries, one layer per
decade since 1911. Fans map their shows down to the single shot: a Twin Peaks map
numbers one drive in Season 3 up to scene 22, and a Godzilla map gives the minute and
second at which Osaka Castle falls. Many of the best are not in English, because
Japanese, French, Spanish, German and Korean fans map Hollywood as closely as their own
cinema.
The oldest pins belong to L’inferno of 1911, two mountain scenes near Lake Como, and from there the map runs one decade per layer to the 2020s, through 131 countries. Each point is a film and the kind of place it shows: Nosferatu’s port at Wismar, the rocks of Cap de Creus in Buñuel’s L’âge d’or, Harry Lime’s corner of Vienna in The Third Man in Vienna, the tunnel in Rome’s The Bicycle Thief, Alto Nido Apartments for Sunset Blvd. This is cinema history rather than a blockbuster list, with Ozu, Dreyer, Vigo, Murnau and Indian silent film beside Chaplin and Keaton, and in the early decades most pins link to a post of filmap, a blog that matches film frames to places.
“Frodo and Sam catch Gollum. It leads the hobbits down the Emyn Muil” is the name of one pin on the slopes of Ruapehu, and most of these 175 objects are named after a scene like that rather than a place: Isildur cutting the Ring from Sauron’s hand, Gandalf riding up to Isengard, Sam and Gollum discussing “coney cookery”. The maker drew more than pins. Barad-dûr’s base and tower are outlined as shapes on the mountain, Isengard’s tower and walls in the Hutt Valley, and dozens of streams and roads are traced as lines. Many pins carry a Street View link to the exact angle, and the notes are honest about the rest: “sorry you cant access this location by google maps”, or for Moria, “some scenes were filmed here, i dont know which ones”. The Rivendell archway at Kaitoke, it adds, “is actually a replica built by weta but you can still walk under the gate”.
On the former Iverson Movie Ranch above Chatsworth, the rocks have names: Doglips, Big Nose Rock, the Football, Frankenstein, and Buster Keaton’s Bathtub on Bathtub Rock, where Keaton filmed Three Ages in 1923. Each one lists the films and TV episodes shot beside it, often dozens, from silent comedy and serials to The Lone Ranger and Bonanza, and many come with a photo by Tyler Malone and links to the Iverson Movie Ranch blog. Further layers cover the other vanished ranches of Los Angeles, Corriganville, Paramount, Walker and the 20th Century Fox ranch, as well as the old studio backlots: RKO’s Forty Acres, where King Kong, Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane were shot, or Mixville, with “None Currently Known” where no film can be named. Another layer lists the movie ranches still working today.
Albuquerque plays Houston, Denver, Omaha, the Mexican border and Alaska in this map of 740 places from Breaking Bad, El Camino and Better Call Saul, and every note says which: Madrigal Electromotive “is pretended to be in Houston, Texas”, a parking lot on State Road 536 is where Jesse gets out with his new identity “somewhere in Alaska”. The layers sort the city by what the places are, from food and drink to infrastructure, and each note retells the scene. At the Hi-Lo Market, Walter fakes a fugue state by taking his clothes off, though “only the exterior scenes” were shot there; in the Isleta Amphitheater parking lot he sets his son’s Challenger on fire. A whole layer of parking lots, alleys and payphones shows how much of the story happens between buildings.
Odo Island’s fishing harbour in Godzilla (1954) is the port of Ijika near Toba, the disaster headquarters is the former National Institute of Public Health, and the railway bridge Godzilla tears apart is Keikyu’s Yatsuyama bridge, rebuilt as a miniature set. The 329 points of this Japanese map follow the films from 1954 to the Millennium series, one layer per era, and mark which shots were miniature sets or composites. For Godzilla Raids Again the author adds timecodes: the Osaka police headquarters at 10 minutes 21 seconds, Godzilla against Anguirus at the Bank of Japan’s old Osaka branch at 41:41, the castle keep destroyed in miniature at 45:26. Street View links show the same angle today, and where a house is gone the note simply says 現存せず, no longer exists.
RAF Northolt appears in four Bond films, from Goldfinger to The World Is Not Enough, and this map of 632 places from the HuntingBond site notes each of them the same way: country, film and Bond. That makes it easy to follow one actor around the world. George Lazenby’s single film takes him to the Casino do Estoril, Café Brasil and the bear pit in Bern, and a stock-car circuit south of Lauterbrunnen. The pins are precise down to a petrol station in Andermatt and the Pilatus factory in Lucerne for Goldfinger, a “Spanish” village that is really Pagi on Corfu, and a fake “Bottoms Up Club” on Hanoi Road in Hong Kong for The Man with the Golden Gun. Some link to a write-up on huntingbond.com, such as Hashima Island for Skyfall or Sirkeci station in Istanbul.
The Varied Thrush on a branch in the opening credits was filmed at Kiana Lodge, and so were the shore where Laura Palmer’s body is found, the Great Northern’s concierge desk and Josie Packard’s vanity in the Blue Pine Lodge. The 201 points split Washington and California for Seasons 1 and 2, Fire Walk With Me and Season 3, and they go shot by shot: Jade and Dougie’s ride through a Palmdale neighbourhood in Part 3 has its own pin for every scene up to 22. The notes catch what the crew changed. At Sparkwood and 21 “there is no actual traffic light”, the street signs on Dougie’s corner were swapped for invented names, and the Rancho Rosa Estates sign was a giant white board replaced in post-production. Most pins link to the article on Twin Peaks Blog that tracked the place down.
Kai Tak Airport for Chungking Express, Kowloon Walled City for Days of Being Wild, the Spectrum in Philadelphia for Rocky II and Tsukiji market for the Truck Rascals films all carry the same prefix here: (CLOSED). The author, 伏見ヨシオ, has pinned 6,094 places where films are set or were shot, in 103 countries, and writes in Japanese what happens at each: in San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, Callahan runs through a tunnel to the phone box the extortionist named in Dirty Harry. Japanese cinema of every decade sits beside Hollywood, Hong Kong and Soviet Kazakh film: in a 1968 film from Almaty a mother steps off the bus at a closed Almaty bus station to visit her son.
In the car park beside Industrial Light & Magic’s old headquarters on Kerner Boulevard, says this French map, you can still see paint marks on the ground from the prequel model shoots. Its 332 points add the studio’s own history to the films and the Disney+ series: Skywalker Sound, ILM Sydney, ILM Mumbai, opened in October 2022 and working on Andor. The series layers are the most detailed, from the Coryton refinery and the beach steps at Cleveleys for Andor to Madeira for The Acolyte and Mount Suilven for Ahsoka, each with what the shot shows. The notes look closely: one Dubrovnik shot of The Last Jedi is flipped compared with reality, and a last layer keeps the places “still being researched or to be checked”.
The TARDIS’s first take-off in An Unearthly Child was filmed from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, looking down on Watling Street. From there this map of 1,781 places pairs the Doctors by layer, the 1st with the 11th, the 2nd with the 12th, and so on, through South Wales, which doubles for Venice, Victorian London and a spaceship’s corridors. The author visits in costume, and the notes are field reports: a working school in Tonyrefail “so had to obtain permission”, part of MOD St Athan sold off to the public, Admiralty Arch photographed twice because “I have since updated my costume”. Some sites are gone, such as Engineers Way at Wembley, where Daleks killed Dortmun in The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Hawkins National Laboratory is the shuttered Georgia Mental Health Institute on Emory’s campus, downtown Hawkins is the square in Jackson, and the Hawkins Post where Jonathan and Nancy work in Season 3 is really the Lithonia Farmers Market. This map of 43 places around Atlanta finds the rest of the town: Benny’s Burgers, Bradley’s Big Buy, where Eleven steals Eggos, the quarry, the abandoned mill used as the Mind Flayer’s lair, and the Georgia Renaissance Festival grounds as the Hawkins fair. Even Chicago in Season 2 is Atlanta’s Fairlie-Poplar district. One pin will disappoint: the phone booth Hopper stops at “was built for the scene and does not exist at the location”.
In Colmar, Maison Pfister of 1537 appears all but directly in Howl’s Moving Castle, and it was built for a hatter, “which is either research or the universe showing off”, since Sophie trims hats for a living. Animated films have no filming locations, so these 53 points map the places Ghibli drew from, film by film and each with a note: Welsh mining valleys and castles for Castle in the Sky, Visby and Stockholm for Kiki’s Delivery Service, which Miyazaki sketched in 1971 after Astrid Lindgren refused to meet him, Niteko Pond for Grave of the Fireflies, now beside a memorial to the 1995 earthquake. At Seiseki-Sakuragaoka, residents of Whisper of the Heart’s suburb “gasped in cinemas at their own houses”.
For the Elvis film Follow That Dream, “they trucked in tons of white sand to create a ‘beach’” on a spit of land in Florida, and native plants have since taken it back. This fan’s 556 field notes measure each place against the film and against old Street View: Bela Lugosi’s house in Ed Wood “was actually Tor Johnson’s house at the time of the original film”, the main street of Clunes in Mad Max “looks amazingly unchanged”. The map leans towards noir, 1950s monster films and the movies of Mystery Science Theater 3000, down to the gap in an El Paso block where the theatre that premiered Manos once stood. Laurel and Hardy’s Music Box staircase is here, and a whole run of Mod Squad episodes, each with its season and episode.
A 7-Eleven in Sinchon has appeared in five dramas, among them Lovely Runner and Gyeongseong Creature 2, and the folk village of Naganeupseong in seven period series, from Mr. Sunshine to Jeongnyeon. This Korean map of 13,178 places, by far the largest on the topic, lists every drama, film, variety show and web show shot at each spot, in five layers. Goblin alone fills pages: Duksung Women’s University’s library, a lookout at Konkuk University, the Mapo police station, and the streets of Quebec City around the Saint François de Laval monument. Most places are cafés, shops, bridges and schools in and around Seoul, the everyday sets of Korean television.
Gotham’s police headquarters in The Batman is the Royal Liver Building, its city hall St George’s Hall in Liverpool, and Wayne Manor appears twice: Knebworth House for Batman (1989) and the ruin of Sutton Scarsdale Hall for Batman v Superman. JJ_Cool_L’s 191 points name the fictional place first and the real one after, with film stills: GoldenEye’s Soviet chemical weapons facility is the Verzasca Dam, the Famous Five’s Kirrin Island is Dunstanburgh Castle, Ophelia’s grave in Hamlet (1990) is Dunnottar Castle. Two layers stray beautifully from the topic. “Hollywood Signs” collects copies of the sign in Brașov, Marseille, Wellington and a Polish village called Hollywood, and “Werbelandschaft” pins the landscapes of German beer adverts, such as the Krombacher island.
Doune Castle was Winterfell in the pilot that never aired, notes this Spanish map, and Minčeta Tower, the highest point of Dubrovnik, is the House of the Undying in Qarth, not King’s Landing. Its 110 places in six countries each name the scene and the season: the lava of Mývatn for Mance Rayder’s camp, the Roman amphitheatre of Itálica for the meeting with Cersei, Girona’s Plaça dels Jurats for the Braavos theatre, Calle Mayor in Peñíscola where Tyrion and Varys give money to a woman with a baby. Baška Voda stands in for Slaver’s Bay, “replacing Morocco in other seasons”, and Essaouira’s ramparts are Astapor, where the Unsullied are presented.
Jack wakes up in the bamboo in the first episode and dies in the same spot in the last, and this map of 398 places on Oahu lists both: “1x01 … 6x17 6x18 The End”. Lost’s flashbacks sent its characters to Sydney, Seoul, Iraq and a Thai beach, and almost all of it was shot in Honolulu: Charlie visiting his brother in Australia, Jin working at the “Grand Seoul Hotel”, Jack flying a kite at a Thai resort. Each pin carries every episode code shot there, the cave set alone more than twenty. One pin outside Hawaii is the Los Angeles bridge where Jack stands on the railing, “now demolished”.
The hostel in Hostel’s Slovakia is Doksany Monastery in the Czech Republic, and the abbey in The Nun is Hunedoara Castle in Romania. This German map of 295 places sorts every pin into the same three fields, the real place, what it plays in the film and the country, across 14 countries: An American Werewolf in London’s man killed at Tottenham Court Road station, Hannibal Lecter gutting a pickpocket at Florence’s Loggia del Mercato Nuovo, Possession’s flat on Bernauer Straße beside the Berlin Wall. Nosferatu stands at Wismar harbour, Friday the 13th’s Camp Crystal Lake at a scout camp in New Jersey, and The Omen’s funeral at Brookwood Cemetery.
In Survivor: Marquesas, contestants bobbed for fafaru, marinated fish bones with crab and lobster legs, and this map knows the cove where it happened. Its 1,156 points place the camps, Tribal Councils and challenge areas of the reality show season by season, from Pulau Tiga in Borneo through Kenya, Thailand, the Amazon and the Pearl Islands, where one challenge took place at the wreck of an old Spanish galleon. Each challenge pin describes the game, such as the S.O.S. signal tribes built for a plane in the very first season. The layer names tell the show’s later history on their own: Seasons 36 to 50 all end in “Fiji”.
“Kusatsu Station” in a Shochiku comedy is really JR Gunma-Haramachi: the station has been rebuilt, but the plaza in front still shows the old days, and the author was surprised to find the building that served as the bus office still standing, photographed on 2 September 2014. Most of the 871 places on this Japanese map are stations and streets of postwar studio films, sorted by studio with wry layer names: Shochiku, Tora-san on his own, “Toei without honour”, “trustworthy Nikkatsu”, “ATG: art or obscenity”, “Shintoho’s hidden masterpieces”. Ozu is here too, with Tokyo Twilight under the Ikegami line viaduct at Gotanda and Equinox Flower at St Luke’s Hospital.
“The farmhouse and barn that Lovejoy rented from Charlie Gimbert. The original gaff!” begins this map of the antiques-dealer series, six layers for six series across Suffolk, Essex, Brighton and Ireland. Every one of the 269 notes names the episode and the scene with a fan’s affection: Eric “scratching” for titbits through the dustbins of Much Hadham, a pub that was the firm’s local for one episode and “now burned to the ground (no connection!)”, Somerleyton Hall as the home of an impoverished family “and a stuffed Pike!”. Even the cars are identified, Lovejoy’s yellow Volvo by its number plate and the Morris Minor “Miriam”, quietly replaced by one in better condition.
K.G.F: Chapter 1 shot at Bengaluru’s Russell Market and the Karnataka Government Museum, and this map of 224 places pins Indian cinema region by region, every title with its director, year and language. It reaches well beyond Bollywood: Malayalam films such as Premam at Kochi’s Pepper House, the Marathi hit Sairat at Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid, Bengali and Tamil films in Kolkata, Alain Corneau’s French Nocturne Indien at Goa’s Fort Aguada. The notes are partly in Japanese, often with the Japanese release title, and they are careful: Bajirao Mastani’s Shaniwar Wada is marked as the story’s setting only, and a café in Bengaluru as closed.
Yau Ma Tei Police Station appears in Election, Portland Street Blues, Dr. Lamb, Colour of the Truth and Best of the Best, and the East Ocean Centre in four films from Yes, Madam! to City on Fire. Each of the 580 places on this map comes from a post of the HongKongOnFilm blog, which tracked them down from 2011 on: 58 Nathan Road for Chungking Express, the Anderson Road quarry for Police Story, the Kowloon Funeral Parlour for Young and Dangerous, a bowling alley for Running Out of Time. Together they cover the crime and action cinema of the 1980s to 2000s across the whole territory, from Tai Long Wan beach to the Kwai Chung walkways.
Schabbach, the village of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat films, does not exist, and this map of 164 places shows how it was put together from several villages of the Hunsrück: its church, cemetery and football pitch each stand somewhere else, and the Simon family’s house with stable and forge somewhere else again. The pins follow all four parts, Heimat, Die zweite Heimat, Heimat 3 and Die andere Heimat, from a slate mine used only for interiors to the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, where Paul meets Apollonia with the pram, and from the Munich flats and dance palace of Die zweite Heimat to an airfield in East Germany.
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