Locations
In the Christmas 1977 the whole film crew of the series ‘Curro Jiménez’ who were shooting the show in Cazorla (Jaén) won the Lottery, except for a young Benito Rabal, who didn’t want to buy a ticket. When they suggested him to buy Lottery tickets for the Lotería del Niño, he declined and the whole crew won again.
At the end of December 1977 it snowed so hard in the village of Cazorla (Jaén) that the crew who was shooting the series ‘Curro Jiménez’ remained completely isolated.
‘Talk to her’’s crew arrived at Lucena just a few hours after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, on 11 September 2001. The shooting in the Nuestra Señora de Araceli chapel took place on day 12 with an entire crew totally shocked by the news, along with Pedro Almodóvar almost voiceless and terribly saddened by the second anniversary of his mother’s death, which was also on that day.
‘Talk to her’ was not the film selected by the Spanish Film Academy (AACCE) to represent Spain at the Oscars of that year (it preferred ‘Mondays in the Sun’). However, Almodóvar’s movie gained two nominations for the coveted Best Director and Best Original Screenplay awards, the latter of which he won; thus, it can be said that a part of that Oscar went to Córdoba and Andalucía.
Steven Spielberg rejected shooting in la Alhambra because the monument was “too visually familiar for us to attempt to use it as a location supposedly somewhere else”.
During the shooting of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in Guadix, in the scene where Marcus start running through the streets in Iskenderun, you can see a local, with his hat, his sash and his jacket, that may slip into the shooting. The same character appears in the scene where Sallah and Marcus met and started a fight with two Nazis. The local is among the group of Arabs who gathered around them. The strange thing is that nobody notices him.
Perhaps because it was partly shot in the provinces of Almeria and Granada, ‘Indiana Jones and the last crusade’ is the instalment of the saga with the biggest audience in our country’s cinemas, 4.2 million viewers.
Steven Spielberg and the location team of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ chose the locations to shoot the film from the air, traveling by helicopter throughout the province. In one of the location days, lunchtime was getting closer and the helicopter landed in the parking lot of the “Parador Nacional de Mojácar”, to the amazement of everyone there, who saw the arrival and ate together with the American director and his team.
If ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ presented for the first time the father of the hero, played by Sean Connery, the series ‘The young Indiana Jones’, shot three years later (1991) showed the adolescence of the character, played by Sean Patrick Flannery. Interestingly, this series, aired in Spain by Antena 3 in 1993, was also filmed in the province of Almeria.
In the famous scene of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in which Sean Connery scares some seagulls to hit a Nazi plane, pigeons, which are less aggressive and easier to domesticate, were used.
During the shooting of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ at Guadix Station, the Cinematography Director, Douglas Slocombe, repeatedly changed some elements of the set to adapt the scene to the sunlight changes.
In the shooting of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in Almería, every extra of the 175 who took part in the film earned 8,000 pesetas (48 euros) per shooting day. This tax beard the following costs: 5,000 pesetas (30€) appeared as mandatory in the contract, adding other concepts (1,000 pesetas – 6€- as ‘plus for the costume’: to dress in an unusual way; 800 pesetas (4,8€) for playing with the head shaved…).
Throughout his career, Sean Connery returned three times to the beach of Monsul (Almeria), because in this environment scenes of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’, ‘Shalako’ and ‘El viento y el Lion’ were filmed.
The parking of the Hotel Parador in Mojácar (Almería) was used as an airport runway for a plane in some scenes in ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’.
Chiringuito Manaca, in Mojácar (Almería) was built on the top of the fort constructed for the movie ‘The Treasure Island’ and they still keep some souvenirs from the film shooting.
During the shooting of ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’, at Playa de Monsul, two people of the production team of the film were attached to the public telephones of El Pozo de los Frailes and San José because there were no more in the area.
During the shooting of ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’, at Playa de Monsul, at the entrance of San José and for months, three elephants who usually went to the beach followed by the local children were camped. Furthermore, once a tiger run away through the beach.
In Carboneras, a village of Almería that has been used as a set for several shootings, you can find Hotel El Dorado, a beautiful place built by the deceased Scottish locator Eddie Fowlie. After the shooting of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Fowlie, considered as David Lean’s right-hand man, decided to live in Almería and opened this hotel. In the inside, you can find numerous pictures and props from some of the movies he worked in. In addition, the main gate of the hotel was used in the film ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’.
Since the hundreds of extras hired were not sufficiently motivated for the scene in Plaza de España in which they had to acclaim Lawrence of Arabia, the director, David Lean, suggested telling them to applaud him as if he were Charles Dickens. But since nobody knew him, the extras coordinator motivated them by telling them to cheer for him as if he were the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez. It actually worked.
During the shooting in Nicolás Salmerón Park, the director of the second unit, Noel Howard (the director David Lean had already left the shooting), suffered an accident. The camera crane that captured the arrival of the tramway had to be removed so the latter could pass underneath, but there was not enough time and it was hit by the vehicle. As a consequence of the crash, Howard sustained a severe 6-inch injury on his right thigh.
The shooting in Seville started on 18 December 1961 and went on for three months. It continued in Almería, where the shooting commenced on 21 March 1961 and ended three months and a half later, on 7 July.
During the shooting in Casa Pilatos, a wire got tangled up one of the ancient Roman statues that filled the building from 1516 and the statue lost her head. The Duchess of Medinaceli, owner of the house, minimised the mishap and stated that “it was only Roman”.
‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was the first shooting of a great magnitude that was carried out in Almería. A total of 1,000 extras, 750 horses and 159 camels brought from the Spanish Sahara were involved in the film. The technical crew was comprised of around 400 people, 250 of which were Spanish, and the artistic crew were more than 150 people.
For the complicated scene of the train explosion, shot in the dunes of Cabo de Gata, a 1-mile railway stretch was built, and more than 60 workers prepared the terrain on which such railway was built. Additionally, they built a special road going through Cabo de Gata. The production company bought from the Spanish train network RENFE two full trains from Almería, Alhama and Santa Fe, which were dismantled and taken to the set by lorries. 10 pounds of vertical explosives, in addition to 10 pounds of black gunpowder, were used. The engine driver set the engine at full speed and jumped out of the train seconds before the explosion. The scene was captured by seven cameras and witnessed by TVE and BBC teams, as well as journalists from various countries who had travelled to Almería to report on the event. Before this, the crew had blasted another 14-coach train containing horses and extras playing Turkish riflemen perched on the roofs of the carriages.
Almost as famous as the shooting were the night binges that, nearly every day, involved the leading actors, Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. Some of these parties lasted up to four days or ended when O’Toole lost consciousness.
In the scene in which General Allenby enters Damascus (Plaza de España in Seville), there were more than 2,000 people, many of which were Romanies who signed up as extras to play Arabs.
During the shooting in the dunes of Cabo de Gata, around 30 horsemen had to cross them riding the corresponding number of sorrel horses. However, while the scene was being shot, the director and the crew witnessed how the horsemen went past the hill and disappeared. They are still waiting for them to come back…
At the Rambla ‘El Cautivo’ in Tabernas, an oasis was built with trees and big palm trees brought from Alicante. This place still exists and, ever since, it has been frequently used by many production companies for outdoor shooting. The constructor of the oasis was the producer Eddie Fowlie, who fell in love with Almería to such a breadth that he settled there for good. Until his death in 2014, Fowlie was the owner of Hotel El Dorado, in Carboneras.
The first day of shooting in Almería, in a pass near Tabernas, a sudden storm caused a flood which nearly destroyed the shooting set, inundated David Lean’s caravan and forced many actors and extras to run uphill.
El Bar de Amancio, which appears in the TV show ‘Mar de plástico’, is inspired by a real bar located at Playa de Balerma (El Ejido, Almería). This bar is very famous among the locals because there usually are live music and cultural activities. The thing that not everyone knows is that only the outdoor scenes are shot in Almería, because the inside of the bar is a set located in Madrid, but inspired by the real one in the coastline of Almeria.
David Trueba said that although the wind from Cabo de Gata sometimes made it difficult to shoot ‘Living is easy with eyes closed’, he tried to see the positive side and took advantage of it for the film. Javier Cámara remembers some beautiful shots of Natalia de Molina, with her mane in the wind.
The movie ‘Living is easy with eyes closed’ is based on a true story. In the sixties, Juan Carrión, a high school teacher who used the lyrics of the Beatles songs to teach English, met John Lennon, who was filming “How I Won the War” in Almeria, and asked him to include the lyrics of their songs on the covers of their albums. And although Trueba did not want to meet Juan while writing the script to avoid being conditioned, as soon as it was written and the movie started, he sought him out. Carrión, who died a few years after the premiere, “enjoyed the success of the film very much,” according to Trueba. In fact, at the 2014 Goya Awards, the director was accompanied by the teacher, who was able to enjoy how his story received the Goya Award for Best Film
Almeria wasn’t in the shooting plans for ‘Never Say Never Again’, but after shooting in the Bahamas there were some scenes left to shoot, and it was Sean Connery himself who recommended the team to come and shoot in Andalusia.
During the filming of ‘007. Never say never again’, the martial arts instructor, Steven Seagal, who was unknown at the time, broke Sean Connery’s wrist in one of the trainings.
The beaches of the province of Almeria are a true natural treasure, famous for their transparent waters. With their secluded coves and majestic cliffs, they offer landscapes of great beauty, such as Playa de los Muertos, with its unspoilt environment and tranquillity, or those of Mónsul and Los Genoveses, surrounded by dunes and unique volcanic formations. In addition, the mild climate and almost constant sunshine make these beaches the perfect place to enjoy the sea and nature all year round.
“I am in the habit, before every shooting, from the first one, Heart of the Warrior, of coming to Cabo de Gata, in Almería, to spend a week and look for inspiration”
