10 Incredible Sets You Didn't Know Were Built From Scratch

8. Guggenheim Museum (The International)

The International was not really the bombastic action flick the trailers promised, instead it was a slow-burn thriller centred around global banking. All of this tension did explode, however, in a standout sequence in the middle of the film, one that relied heavily on its unique setting. Taking place on the spiral staircase of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Clive Owen becomes embroiled in a massive shootout, trying desperately to make his way down towards the exit without getting shot. For obvious reasons, the crew couldn€™t actually shoot up the illustrious museum, so they did the next best thing and built an exact replica of the building in Germany. With help from the actual people at Guggenheim in getting the layouts and designs right, they were able to make a startlingly realistic lookalike that had viewers questioning if somehow they had really gotten permission to shoot in the actual museum. Building up a new structure from scratch is hard enough, so the fact that The International managed to do this with a real, well-known building is all the more impressive.