Buffalo Bill’s house sits in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, while Clarice Starling’s FBI training takes place nowhere near Quantico’s actual campus. Jodie Foster’s exterior academy scenes were filmed at the real FBI facility, one of the rare occasions when the bureau allowed a studio to film there. The moth farm scenes, meanwhile, were shot in West Virginia, far from the Ohio setting the story suggests. Orion Pictures released the film in 1991, and geographical accuracy was clearly not high on the list of priorities. | © Orion Pictures
Wes Craven set A Nightmare on Elm Street in Springwood, Ohio, a town that exists only on paper. Every frame was shot around Los Angeles, mostly in Hollywood and Venice Beach houses standing in for suburban Midwest streets. The famous Elm Street house on Genesee Avenue still gets tourists knocking on the door. New Line Cinema built its entire future on a film that never left Southern California. | © New Line Cinema
Vietnam never appears in Full Metal Jacket, despite Stanley Kubrick building the film's reputation on its brutal realism. The Parris Island boot camp scenes were filmed in England, and the war-torn city of Hue was recreated at the derelict Beckton Gas Works in East London. Kubrick's crew brought in Spanish palm trees to sell the Southeast Asian look. The gasworks were demolished shortly after filming wrapped, so the set only ever existed for this one movie. | © Warner Bros.
Stephen King based the Overlook Hotel on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, but Stanley Kubrick built the interior sets at EMI Elstree Studios in England. The production used Oregon’s Timberline Lodge for exterior establishing shots, swapping King’s haunted room 217 for the fictional room 237 at the hotel management’s request. | © Warner Bros.
Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan is actually Ballinesker Beach on the Irish coast, not Normandy. Steven Spielberg chose County Wexford because France's real beaches had changed too much since 1944 to look right on camera. The production trucked in old landing craft and brought military advisors to drill extras for weeks beforehand. Ireland's coastline ended up standing in for the most famous stretch of sand in war film history. | © Paramount Pictures
Alabama's own Edmund Pettus Bridge did make it into Selma, but plenty of the surrounding city did not. Director Ava DuVernay filmed large portions in and around Atlanta, since parts of Selma itself had changed too much since 1965. The state capitol steps scene was shot in Georgia, not Montgomery. Paramount released the film in 2014, exactly 49 years after the actual march. | © Paramount Pictures
Not one frame of Chicago was shot in Chicago. Rob Marshall filmed the whole production in Toronto, using the city's old theaters and courthouses as stand-ins. Lake Shore Drive shows up briefly, but it's Toronto's version, not Illinois. Miramax released the film in 2002, and it went on to win Best Picture without ever visiting its own setting. | © Miramax
A monster supposedly tearing through Manhattan in Cloverfield never actually touched New York soil during filming. Matt Reeves shot most of the handheld footage in Los Angeles, including the party scene that opens the film. Some exterior shots came from Manhattan, but the destruction sequences relied on visual effects built afterward. Paramount kept the production so secret in 2007 that early trailers didn't even carry a title. | © Paramount Pictures
Tony Montana's Miami empire in Scarface was built almost entirely somewhere else. Universal Pictures moved production to Los Angeles after Florida officials objected to a script glorifying drug violence, worried it would hurt the city's image. The mansion pool scene, one of the film's most famous shots, was filmed at a house in Montecito, California. Brian De Palma's Miami is mostly borrowed scenery from three thousand miles away. | © Universal Pictures
Detroit gave RoboCop its identity, but the city barely appears in the finished film. Budget and scheduling pushed most of the shoot to Dallas and Pittsburgh, where crumbling steel infrastructure doubled for a decaying Motor City. The Old Detroit police station was actually a real building in Pittsburgh's south side. Orion Pictures still marketed the whole thing as a Detroit story when it opened in 1987. | © Orion Pictures
Oliver Stone shot Platoon in the Philippines in 1986, not Vietnam. He'd served with the 25th Infantry Division himself and picked the jungle near Cabatuan because it matched the terrain he remembered. The cast went through a real two-week boot camp before filming started. The sweat and exhaustion in those early scenes were very real. | © Orion Pictures
Matthew McConaughey lost 47 pounds to play Ron Woodroof, and that transformation happened while Dallas Buyers Club was shot in New Orleans. Jean-Marc Vallée moved the production to Louisiana for its tax incentives, a common workaround for period dramas set elsewhere. Woodroof's actual buyers club operated out of a rundown motel room downtown. Louisiana sunlight and architecture had to fake it convincingly enough to win two acting Oscars. | © Focus Features
The production team behind the 1979 release of The Amityville Horror relocated filming to Toms River, New Jersey, after Long Island officials denied site access. Carpenters modified a local riverfront residence with the story's signature quarter-round eye windows, drawing crowds to the coastal New Jersey neighborhood for decades. | © American International Pictures
Rick's Café Americain never existed in Casablanca, Morocco, because the entire film was built on a Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. Humphrey Bogart never set foot in Morocco during production. The fog around the final airport scene came from a small cardboard cutout plane and dry ice, not actual runway weather. Michael Curtiz shot the whole thing in under two months in 1942, thousands of miles from the war it depicted. | © Warner Bros.
Nothing about the ocean in Titanic was real. James Cameron built his ship at a purpose-made studio in Rosarito, Mexico, in a tank holding 17 million gallons of water. The Atlantic crossing that sank the actual liner in 1912 happened off Newfoundland, nowhere near the Baja coast. Cameron chose Mexico simply because nowhere in the US had a tank big enough to sink a ship that size. | © Paramount Pictures
Plenty of films confidently set their stories in real places, then got the geography, landmarks, or vibe hilariously wrong. Here are 15 movies that got the location totally wrong.
