Halfway between a cinema book and a travel guide, Guillaume Evin’s “Sur Les Routes du Cinéma” (On the Roads of Cinema) covers nearly 400 pages of film locations and natural settings from several hundred films. The longest of all cinephile road-trips.
Planning a trip to Havana? A chance to visit the filming locations of Laurent Cantet’s “Retour à Itaque” or Olivier Assayas’ Cuban Network. A weekend in Montreal? Why not sit on the bench in La Fontaine Park, where Jeremy Irons and Bradley Cooper set up shop in The Words (which, in this 2012 film, featured New York’s Central Park). And don’t forget to admire the airport as you leave the plane – it’s the one seen in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (and not the JFK Airport as portrayed in the film). If New York or Paris is your destination, you’re spoilt for choice: every neighborhood has its own scene or film.
Conceived as a richly illustrated travel book, “Sur La Route du Cinéma” takes us on a journey across four continents, exploring over five hundred films and as many locations in short notes or longer texts. We’ll discover five different ways of filming Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf, from Moonraker to The Return of the Tall Blond Guy. Take a stroll down Mexico City’s Calle Tepeji, guided by Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, and you might even recognise the setting for Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s “Mustang” in the small houses of the Turkish Black Sea port of Inebolu. When cinema makes you want to travel, and travel makes you want to go to the movies.
“Sur les routes du cinéma” by Guillaume Evin, Chêne Editions, 384 pages, €.45
editionsduchene.fr/chene/sur-la-route-du-cinema-9782812321481