Knackered after a long flight from London into New York, I just wanted to get to the hotel and so we wasted no time in hopping into a taxi from JFK airport and headed straight for Wall Street (where the hotel was).
We’d stayed at the hotel before and so I felt like I knew what to expect but lo and behold, for some reason, the taxi driver couldn’t get to the front of the hotel so we had to get off down the road and walk for about two minutes to get to the hotel.
About a minute in, I kinda realised everything seemed a bit ‘different’ and my curiosity overtook my tiredness and so I stopped to find out what was going on when a guy casually replied:
“Oh we’re shooting a movie with Ben Stiller today…”.
I kept thinking…
“Act cool, act cool…”
but I’m not cool so I kinda freaked and whipped out my camera and started taking photos of everything and anything!
The hotel room at the hotel also had a view of the movie being filmed below (#Win!) and I eventually found out the movie in question was “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty”.
The scene that was being filmed was the skateboarding bit where Ben Stiller has that fight with Adam Scott (if you haven’t seen the film yet, go see it and then that scene will make sense to you).
We go to see Ben Stiller doing his thing (though from a distance) and I tried to take as many photos as possible! Here are said photos!
Also, you know how this all looks like it’s just a regular street in Manhattan and everyone’s just going about their own thing? Well that is a misconception.
Everything – including the cars were all movie set props (they reversed them back and forth while re-filming certain scenes) and every person there was a movie extra.
The only reason we were allowed to walk on set was that we were staying at the hotel right where they were filming it on Wall Street and so we had no choice but to wander onto the movie set.
Easily one of the more random and memorable events I’ve gotten to witness in New York and I’m really glad (especially considering how much I love movies) that I got to see first hand how a movie is made.
N.B.: That scenes last a couple of minutes but it must have taken over 5 hours to shoot just that scene! (And even then, I have no idea if they got all that they needed or would need to re-film that scene again at a later date).
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