For tourism, such events are worth their weight in gold which is why most cities have their own dedicated Film Commissions, set up to attract movie producers to their doorsteps. Titans is said to have generated €2.5 million in revenue for Tenerife during the shoot alone, to say nothing of expected visitor spin-offs this year. As the Canarian Government’s Director General for Territorial Planning, Sulbey González, commented: “This is a great opportunity for all the islands to promote themselves to the rest of the world. From what we have seen so far, this will be a film worth waiting for and just think what it will mean if this film is nominated for an Oscar!” Mainand Spain, too, is no stranger to Hollywood. Big box office characters such as James Bond, Indiana Jones, Anakin Skywalker and Lawrence of Arabia have all been here to shoot their adventures, accompanied by battalions of art directors, set designers and camera crews dedicated to transforming urban and rural landscapes into surreal other worlds, from the Sahara desert and the Siberian steppe to outer space. Seville’s emblematic Plaza de España morphed into an extra-terrestrial palace on the planet Naboo for the arrival of Senator Amidala and her protector Jedi, Anakin Skywalker, in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones; Almería’s Cabo de Gata Nature Reserve was chosen by Steven Spielberg to shoot action sequences for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and surroundings open the 007 adventure, The World Is Not Enough, while in Die Another Day, the famous spy can be seen strolling through the streets of Cádiz. Orson Welles chose the village of Calatañazor in Soria province to shoot scenes for Chimes at Midnight and staged battle scenes within the city walls of Ávila (sequences that inspired later battle scenes in Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan). But, perhaps most incredible of all, the countryside around Madrid was transformed into the snowbound battlefields of the Russian Revolution for Doctor Zhivago! Spain’s versatile landscapes can pass as many locations. Andalucía, with its snow-capped mountains, sunny beaches, serpentine mountain roads and arid desert, has played stand-in for Jordan, Israel, barren Afghanistan, mountainous Tibet, verdant South America and even the wild Australian outback. Sometimes it even plays itself: Málaga was both the central theme and the location for El Camino de los Ingleses (2006), directed by the city’s most famous son, Antonio Banderas. Almería, with its strange lunar landscape and barren Tabernas Desert, cornered the lion’s share of location shoots for Spaghetti Westerns, the broad sub-genre of low budget films produced by Spanish and Italian companies that emerged in the mid-1960s and took off like a bullet from a Colt 45. Although most of these movies were ‘turkeys’, they were redeemed by the trilogy directed by Sergio Leone, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), starring Clint Eastwood as an anti-heroic gunslinger motivated by money. Today, several of the production studios (Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood) preserve some of the old sets as tourist attractions.
Gold In Them There Hills
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