Why Vancouver can play so many other cities

This is a researched feature, separate from Nick Atwal’s personal film reviews.

Vancouver’s best screen performance is the one you’re not supposed to notice. Downtown has been dressed as San Francisco. Gastown has played Seattle. A building on the UBC campus has stood in for Nigeria. Like any good character actor, the city disappears into the role, then watches someone else’s name go on the poster. Here’s how that disguise works on the ground, and what it costs.

Crews, tax credits and production statistics get their own companion piece, How Vancouver changed the way Hollywood works.

1. Downtown and the viaducts

   Deadpool · Georgia Viaduct closures, April 2015

   Downtown can play an invented city, but some structures never fool a local. The Georgia Viaduct is the clearest case. To shoot Deadpool (2016), the production closed it in stages between April 5 and 18, 2015, mostly on weekdays from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m., while the westbound Dunsmuir Viaduct stayed open. Executive producer Aditya Sood told CBC News it was the best location in Vancouver to film a complicated highway crash scene. High praise, if you’re a viaduct. To audiences, it was a highway in a Deadpool movie. To locals, it was still the viaduct.

   The rest of the film leaned on the streets east of downtown. Destination Vancouver’s location guide says Deadpool was mainly shot around the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown, with the exterior of Vanessa’s apartment at 529 Gore Avenue. The city’s Chinatown filming page notes that most merchants won’t entertain filming requests around the Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese New Year and the Winter Festival, and it advises productions to talk early with groups such as the Vancouver Chinatown Merchants Association. In neighbouring Strathcona, the city says filming generally shouldn’t be scheduled on statutory holidays, Chinese New Year, Halloween or local schools’ sports days. A production can borrow the street. The neighbourhood still keeps the calendar.

   Civic landmarks get the same treatment. Location guides list the Vancouver Art Gallery and its plaza among the downtown sites used for X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), one of several X-Men features made in the region.

2. Glass and concrete

   Godzilla · Oceanic Plaza as a BART station

   Vancouver’s office towers, stadium and convention buildings are generic enough to wear another city’s label. That’s the point. Godzilla (2014) travels between Japan, Honolulu and San Francisco, yet Destination Vancouver reports that most of it was shot in Vancouver and elsewhere in British Columbia, with some scenes in Hawaii and Las Vegas. The BART station on screen is Oceanic Plaza, on West Hastings Street downtown. The vast FEMA emergency shelter near the end is BC Place Stadium. A stadium playing a federal disaster response. That’s range.

   Other public spaces became other countries. Destination Vancouver lists the Vancouver Convention Centre as the film’s Honolulu airport, and Steveston, in Richmond, as both the Japanese town of Janjira and San Francisco’s harbour. One location, both sides of the Pacific, one film. That’s how far set dressing and visual effects can stretch a place. Steveston didn’t even need a passport.

   Big interiors help too. The City of Vancouver’s location guide uses the Convention Centre as its example of a large property where filming indoors may not need a city permit, provided lights, trucks and noise don’t affect the public. Keep the crew out of sight and you skip the street closures a viaduct sequence demands.

3. Homes and neighbourhoods

   Fifty Shades of Grey · Gastown as Seattle

   The Fifty Shades films are set largely in Seattle, but Destination Vancouver’s Fifty Shades itinerary puts much of their street life in Gastown, where Ana lives and works. The guide points to the Gastown building used for her apartment, to 110 East Cordova Street, which served as the headquarters of her employer, Seattle Independent Publishing, and to the Water St. Cafe at Water and Cambie, where the couple renegotiate their contract over dinner. Even the romance in these films comes with paperwork.

   The small touches sell it. The same guide says the production set the Gastown Steam Clock to 7:30 for an entire night of filming. Time stood still in Gastown, for continuity reasons. The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver stood in for the Heathman Hotel, and its British Columbia Ballroom was used for Christian’s photo shoot for Ana’s college magazine.

   Residential filming runs through a permit system built around repeat visits. The city says filming inside a private home still needs a permit if lights or truck noise affect the public. For late-night work, or a location used again and again, it requires a two-stage notification: first a poll of the neighbourhood to measure support, then approval of the permit and final notice. Particularly invasive work, such as a major special effect, also triggers a poll. The street that plays Seattle is still somebody’s street.

4. University and forest

   UBC: more than 100 productions in 2019–20

   Campuses offer what downtown can’t: big, controlled sites with distinctive architecture. UBC’s Vancouver campus is the best-documented example. The university reported more than 100 productions on its campuses in the 2019–20 fiscal year, and its campus planning office lists three X-Men films, Tomorrowland, Fifty Shades of Grey and two of Disney’s Descendants features among the big-budget films shot there. It also cites a GoCompare estimate that ranked the campus ninth among filming locations worldwide. Somewhere in all of this, people are trying to get degrees. And the raid X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) sets in Nigeria? Location guides and UBC campus blogs place it at the campus’s Buchanan Tower.

   Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Mountain campus, designed by Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey and opened in 1965, gets cast differently. SFU says its architecture lends itself to science fiction and fantasy, and it lists The Fly II (1989), I, Robot (2004), Battlestar Galactica (2004) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) among the productions filmed there since the 1970s. Burnaby Now adds Stargate SG-1 and The X-Files. On screen, those concrete terraces become government compounds, laboratories and the future. Hollywood has seen the future, and it has terraces.

   Past the city limits, forest and water finish the set. Destination Vancouver identifies the lake in the X-Men series’ Phoenix scene as Alouette Lake, in Golden Ears Provincial Park near Maple Ridge, and location guides list Golden Ears among the sites used for X-Men: The Last Stand. Inside Vancouver, parks are permitted through the Park Board rather than the city’s film office, and the busiest tourist areas, such as rose gardens, totem poles and beaches, have restricted filming hours in the busy season.

5. The catch

   Impostor Cities · Canada at Venice, 2021

   A great stand-in can leave a city economically central and culturally invisible. When Vancouver plays San Francisco or Seattle well, you’re meant to forget it’s here at all. On screen, success looks like absence.

   Canada made that tension the subject of its official entry at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2021. Impostor Cities, commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts and curated by David Theodore of McGill University with the Montréal firm TBA/Thomas Balaban Architect, examined how Canadian cities stand in for other places on screen. The Canada Pavilion was wrapped in green-screen fabric. Point a smartphone at it, and a montage of film clips appeared. Canada went to Venice dressed as a green screen. Method acting.

   The pressure shows at street level too. The City of Vancouver designates heavily used spots as “hot” or “sensitive” locations: a hot location has hit the limit of filming permits the city will issue for a while, and a sensitive one is getting close. Those designations can change on very short notice. Yes, a street can be officially tired. Neighbourhoods absorb the trucks and the closures. The finished film names a city somewhere else.

A note on geography

“Filmed in Vancouver” often gets stretched to cover the whole Metro region. Several examples above are in Burnaby, Richmond or Maple Ridge, and some X-Men locations are farther away still, like Hatley Castle on Vancouver Island, which played Xavier’s school. This piece separates the city from its neighbours wherever a source does. Burnaby would like its credit, thank you.

The ability to disappear is what makes Vancouver valuable to international productions. It’s also the catch. A city can spend decades on screen and still be waiting for its own close-up. For the films that gave it one, see 10 films that let Vancouver be Vancouver.

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