Traveling to Movie Locations

A few years ago, a friend of mine, who knows how much I love cinema and music written for films, made me one of the best presents I ever got for my birthday: A book about traveling to real movies & TV shows location locations.

If you watch movies and TV shows, you have already seen quite a bit of New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Washington, Chicago, Rome, Barcelona, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Viena, Tokyo, Venice...

There are directors who have a love affair with certain cities such as Woody Allen and New York, where he most of the time shows a romanticized version of his favorite city; and directors who show you the gruesome side of the same city, like Martin Scorsese's vision of New York in "Taxi Driver".

Some movies can work as tourism guides for the city or place that they depict, such as Vienna in "Before Sunrise" and Paris in "Before Sunset", both directed by Richard Linklater where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy fall in love while visiting those cities. Another example of this is the island in the movie "The Beach", directed by Danny Boyle, where Leonardo DiCaprio goes to a paradise island in search of the greatest experience of his life. In fact, after the movie was released, the Phi Phi islands became one of the most popular places visited by tourists in Thailand. Not as popular, but another island that generated a lot of interest was Skellig MIchael, after it was known that one of the most anticipated scenes in the Star Wars movie "The Force Awakens" was shot there. Watching that scene in Star Wars, Episode 8, with the magnificent music John Williams wrote for it, makes the place unforgettable.

And speaking of islands, that brings us to Skopelos (shown in the photo), the gorgeous Greek island featured in the movie "Mamma Mia!", which in the movie is called Kalokairi, where Meryl Streep and the other characters enjoy their carefree lives, going for swims on turquoise waters and singing Abba songs.

Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay.