By guest contributor Michael Nazarewycz
It’s easy to take for granted a film’s location.
Some settings, of course, are mandatory to support the historical accuracy of a film; consider the importance of location in a war picture or biopic. Other settings might not be important for historical accuracy per se, but are critical to the believability of a film. For example, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), title aside, never would have worked anywhere else but in New York City, given the high-finance, decade-of-decadence aspects of the story. Beyond instances like these, though, it’s easy for filmmakers to pigeonhole movie locations into high-level descriptions like big city, sprawling country, hot resort, or cozy hamlet.
But where do you set your film when you need more than geography? Where do you set your film when the location is less about sense of place and more about state of mind?
