By Garry Maddox
In thousands of cinemas around the world last weekend, movie-goers watched Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt reigniting a romance against the spectacular backdrop of Sydney Harbour, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge in the Hollywood action comedy The Fall Guy.
A few months ago, it was Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell falling in love around the same internationally famous landmarks in the romantic comedy Anyone But You.
Ryan Gosling is dragged across the Harbour Bridge in The Fall Guy.Credit: Universal
“Within half a millisecond, everyone in the world knows where you are,” film location manager Jeremy Peek said about Hollywood’s fascination with the city’s most famous tourist attractions. “It’s a snapshot: you show the Bridge, you show the Opera House, you’re in Sydney. This is going to be fun!”
Two more Hollywood blockbusters shot in Sydney and elsewhere in NSW will be in cinemas around the world this month - Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, set on the American west coast, has just opened. In a fortnight, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, set in a post-apocalyptic desert, will follow.
When you include the American series NCIS: Sydney, which started with a sailor dying of radiation poisoning during an AUKUS ceremony on the harbour and is now getting a second season, the city is shining as a filming location possibly more than ever before.
But does it always have to be Sydney Harbour on screen?
Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney in Anyone But You.Credit: Brook Rushton/Sony via AP
Attracting tourists is part of the pay-off for federal and state government film subsidies designed to attract Hollywood productions, along with jobs, and The Fall Guy and Anyone But You will almost certainly do that. But there are great swathes of the city with filmmaking potential as well.
Producer Annabel Davis, who shot the 2021 Australian drama Here Out West in Blacktown, believes there has often been a narrow representation of Sydney - and Australia generally - in films.
“How we represent our city and our country really informs our national identity,” she said. “The stories we tell don’t just reflect reality, they help us shape it.”
Davis has a point: whenever Hollywood movies are shot in the west or south-western suburbs, where much of the city’s population lives, they are generally set somewhere else.
A paddock in Bringelly has doubled for Japan (Hacksaw Ridge). A Sydney Olympic Park carpark - now the location of the new UrbnSurf centre - has been a robot pilot training base (Pacific Rim: Uprising). And a Sydney Water reservoir at Potts Hill near Chullora has been another post-apocalyptic location (Mad Max: Fury Road), an uncharted planet (Alien: Covenant) and now New York (Mark Wahlberg crime drama Play Dirty).
Director Wes Ball on the set of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which was shot in Sydney and the Illawarra.Credit: Jasin Boland/20th Century Studios
An old industrial building at Melrose Park has been both a vivid fairytale world (Three Thousand Years Of Longing) and Mad Max’s Gas Town (Furiosa), and the Parramatta Female Factory and many other Sydney locations have doubled for England’s Lake District (two Peter Rabbit movies).
When George Miller needed two kilometres of straight dirt road for the final truck rollover in Mad Max: Fury Road, he went to Penrith Lakes.
Director George Miller and Chris Hemsworth on the set of Furiosa, which was shot in Broken Hill and Sydney.Credit: Jasin Boland
Screen NSW’s Senior Manager for Destination Attraction, Mark Lazarus, said that for cinema-goers wanting escapism in a movie, the beauty of Sydney Harbour and the Opera House made the city “a magical place” for overseas audiences.
The two latest Hollywood movies, joining such previous Harbour-dominated films as Mission: Impossible 2 and Jackie Chan’s Bleeding Steel, were “like expensive ads” for Sydney.
But Lazarus said many less famous places around Sydney could also work for Hollywood movies.
Arka Das’ short film Khana Khazana that he is turning into the feature film Khana
“When Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was scouting locations, I saw images from places I’d never been - natural places and urban spaces - viewed through the lens of really creative and imaginative people,” he said. “I would have walked past that lane or pedestrian bridge and it would never have occurred to me it was a compelling image.”
Lazarus thought there was potential at Prospect Reservoir and the fast-changing urban landscape of Parramatta. There were also stories with international appeal yet to be told in the city’s multicultural communities.
“Studios and streamers are constantly under pressure to deliver commercial projects that have the widest audience appeal possible,” he said. “If they find a great story from those communities, or they’re given one by one of our wonderful Australian writers, they can respond to that.”
American director Will Gluck, who has shot Anyone But You and two Peter Rabbit movies in Sydney, said that for international audiences, “it’s the vibe, the energy of Sydney that gets people excited” as much as the landmarks and landscapes and he thought there was an endless list of other locations.
“There’s so much more of the city that has yet to be exposed by filmmakers,” Gluck said. “The thriving contemporary vitality of Parramatta, the historic charm of The Rocks, the artistic scene in Newtown, the charm of Paddington, the beauty of Tamarama ... You have a story? Sydney has a location.”
Here Out West, an Australian rather than a Hollywood production that had a cinema run and screened on the ABC after opening Sydney Film Festival, was written by eight writers from different cultural backgrounds in nine languages.
“It allowed people to feel seen,” Davis said. “It was a nice change up to say ‘what is Sydney today, who’s living in Sydney, whose stories are we telling?’”
Here Out West has now spawned three coming Australian films set in western Sydney - an untitled genre film backed by Parramatta Powerhouse, Arka Das’ Khana, a drama set in a failing Indian restaurant, and Bina Bhattacharya’s From All Sides, about a multiracial bisexual couple navigating life.
Peek, who thinks Sydney can double for just about anywhere, was asked recently to find locations for a Hollywood film set in Mongolia and Tibet. Needless to say, he did not suggest Sydney Harbour or Bondi Beach.
“Some of the best options were outside of Campbelltown at Denham Court, out the back of Badgerys Creek, at Bringelly then big rolling hills at Luddenham,” Peek said. “Then [outside Sydney] you’ve got Goulburn, the Monaro and Cooma. They said ‘this is great, we can make this movie here. You guys have Tibet and Mongolia’.“
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