Educating Rita in Maynooth
Not a lot of people know that the 1983 film Educating Rita, starring Julie Walters and Michael Caine, though mostly set in Northern England, was entirely shot in Ireland.
For example, the scenes at the University in which Caine’s character Frank works were filmed at Trinity College Dublin. Here’s the facade from an early scene:
A list of many of the outdoor scenes and their actual locations can be found here.
One thing I hadn’t realised until yesterday involves the short part of the film in which Frank is on holiday in France. Here is a still from that sequence.
The setting is St Patrick’s College Maynooth!
Other scenes supposed to be in France were filmed just down the road from Maynooth, in Celbridge.
I never thought Maynooth looked particularly French, but there you go. You live and learn…
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May 24, 2020 at 3:26 pm
Many films are shot in countries other than those in which they take place, often to save money. Not long ago I saw a Belgian film much of which was shot in Wuppertal in Germany. Stanley Kubrick shot in Germany in the 1950s, which is how he met his German wife. I think that some US films are shot in Canada. Helsinki was often used in the old days for an exotic but in practice not accessible location, as most viewers wouldn’t recognize it.
May 25, 2020 at 8:25 am
Glasgow was Philadelphia in World War Z (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-14595801) and San Francisco in Cloud Atlas !
May 25, 2020 at 10:59 am
In a movie review of Masked and Anonymous (nothing to do with corona, by the way), I read “Dylan stars as Jack Fate, a singer once famous, now on the skids, who is recruited by promoter John Goodman to do a benefit concert in a war zone of a Third World nation (downtown Los Angeles supplied the locations).”
May 25, 2020 at 11:07 am
Martin Ritt’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) also used Dublin, as a double for East Berlin.