#Spectre film locations movie#

At one point on the first Saturday of filming, Waltz also posed for a rare photo with members of staff at the popular restaurant l’Ocean Tanger.Īs well as the work conducted in Tangier, the Moroccan location shooting for SPECTRE has involved some filming for a train sequence in and near the city of Oujda, which is surrounded by desert in the east of the country, and also some additional sequences in the desert areas near the south-eastern city of Erfoud. For the Oujda filming, which involved Craig and Lea Seydoux, SPECTRE tapped into a long-standing Bond tradition by using a night-time express train as part of the plotline: in this case, the distinctive red-coloured carriages of the Oriental Desert Express train.įor the Erfoud scenes, the filming has made use of a large compound in the desert, which forms another key element in the storyline and relates to the villain played by Waltz. The hotel’s cool hanging gardens are also the perfect place to be after the punishing heat of the day. Fleming, who had also visited Tangier during the War, flew into Tangier in April, 1957, and stayed in room 52 of the hotel, a lovely old Arab-style hotel which has a tiled forecourt and arched windows.

Interestingly, Waltz stayed at the famous El Minzah Hotel, which just happens to be a hotel where James Bond author Ian Fleming once stayed while conducting research for his non-fiction book The Diamond Smugglers (1957). Tangier, which over the course of the 20th century developed something of a romantic reputation as an international haven for European spies and secret intrigue, has also regularly drawn tourists from around the globe because of its artistic and literary past, with artists, writers and musicians taking up residence at various times over the years.Ĭast and crew for SPECTRE stayed in several hotels in the area, with Craig at a 4-star hotel. Shooting also took place in a nearby local weavers’ market. Interestingly, this very spot is also famous for appearing in a painting by the French artist Henri Matisse, who spent seven months in Morocco, from 1912 to 1913. There had also clearly been some careful set decoration by SPECTRE unit support personnel on some other buildings in the locality before the main filming was undertaken, with a local pharmacy converted into a cafe with a ‘vintage’ look, and plenty of electrical cables in evidence in some of the narrow alleyways. This particular villa is well-known in the district, as it housed the famous Cafe Dahlia, a popular haunt of generations of artists and writers for many years. Tangier can be roughly divided into three fairly distinct sections: the old Medina, the Kasbah, and the new city, and the First Unit filming (perhaps unsurprisingly) has concentrated on locations in the first two of these sections, areas which retain much of their old historical appeal, with local traders, markets and a maze of various back alleyways, together with a unique combination of Arab and old European colonial architecture.Ī First Unit clapperboard image from the first day of principal photography in Tangier was shared on twitter, and showed a (repainted) Moroccan villa located in the sloping cobbled street area just beyond the Bab el Assa, a famous stone gateway to the Kasbah.

#Spectre film locations movie#

The Second Unit had already obtained some Moroccan desert footage for the movie in 2014, and the First Unit started work on what is the last major location shoot for the film on June 20th, in the port town of Tangier, which is in the north of the country. Warning: There may be one or two possible minor spoilers.įor the last leg of SPECTRE, Britain’s premier MI6 agent found himself facing heat, sun, and a fair amount of desert dust, when some key sequences were shot on location in Morocco.

In the following, the JBIFC provides a brief summary of some of the Moroccan stages of SPECTRE, filming which has formed an important final leg of the long seven-month general shoot on the latest 007 movie. Key members of the cast, including Daniel Craig, Lea Seydoux and Christoph Waltz, have been involved in the main shooting in the country, which also saw approximately four months of careful preparations and set construction beforehand. The last week of June and first few days of July have seen the SPECTRE main cast and crew shooting on location in Morocco, in north Africa, with director Sam Mendes overseeing the last leg of principal photography for the new 007 adventure.