4. Scarface
Brian De Palma's three hour opus about the life of the upwardly mobile purveyor of disco enhancing substances, Tony Montana, is notable for its alternating focus between the blinding sunshine and lurid architecture of Miami, and the lush Bolivian compound of Montana's supplier, Alejandro Sosa. The distance between the two locations makes the trust Sosa places in Montana, not to mention the latter's own charismatic persuasiveness, all the more remarkable, so it's rather a shock to learn that much of the movie, including Montana's bid for freedom from Cuba, was shot in California. Both Tony's and Sosa's compounds, for instance, can be found in Santa Barbara! The distance between settings is often integral to films' plots, and one of the key ways in which we participate in cinematic narratives is by inputting our sense of the vastness of the world into the ostensible gaps we're told to observe. That being said, from a production standpoint, the closer they are the better.