1. Full Metal Jacket
Another film based in two very distinct locations offers perhaps the quintessential geographical switcheroo. Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket is split down the middle, with the brutality and isolation of the U.S. Marine training facility located on Parris Island, South Carolina, being followed by the catharsis and nihilism that Vietnam propagated as a theatre of war. It's a testament to Kubrick's reputation as a consummately particular filmmaker that I was stunned to learn that the whole shebang had been filmed in Cambridgeshire, about fifty miles north of London, England. It simply didn't seem possible. After a while I could rationalise that the Parris Island scenes were do-ableand were in fact British military facilitiesbut how had Kubrick created a war-torn Asian country on London's rural-urban fringe? Well, as is a common theme with the most unlikely of real-world settings, the location scout in this case discovered a gas works that was scheduled to be demolished. Modern day location scouts must have all manner of feelers out, primed to tell them the instant something is about to be flattened, because they're a filmmaker's dreamcheap and utterly disposable. Over three months, vast amounts of ecologically-correct vegetation was added, and buildings pocked, scorched, blown-up and knocked down in order to simulate "a world of shit." I didn't doubt it for a second.