Two films are called The Bourne Identity, and the older one is the one that went to Zurich. The 1988 television version, with Richard Chamberlain, shows the city from the Römerhof to the Münsterbrücke. In the 2002 film Bourne opens a Zurich safe deposit box, wakes on a Zurich park bench and stands in a Zurich street under snow. Those are five addresses in Prague.
10
places on the route
Six of the places are in Prague, and five of those play Zurich — switch regions with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Substitution runs through most of this page. Five Prague places play Zurich, a mill eight kilometres north of Wenceslas Square plays a farmhouse in the French countryside, and a restaurant on Mykonos plays a scooter rental. The producer, Patrick Crowley, gave the reason while the film was new: Zurich looked dull on camera unless you stood back far enough to get the lake into the shot, and Prague could give them exteriors with more drama in them. Whether the production ever put a camera in Zurich at all is unsettled. A commentary track says it did, the Swiss press has twice said the Zurich scenes were shot in Prague, and nobody names a Zurich address. The ground under the places below is uneven in the same way: three Prague streets come from the state film commission, the mill from two newspapers, and two of the buildings from one Prague guide who worked them out of the film himself.
The Zurich scenes
17. listopadu, beside the Old Jewish Cemetery
17. listopadu seen from the Rudolfinum end, with the Museum of Decorative Arts on the right. In the film this street is Zurich, under snow.
The same street looking the other way, with the wall on the right that Bourne stands beside in the film.
Photo: Czech Wikipedia user Packa · CC BY-SA 2.5 · Wikimedia Commons
A man stands in the middle of a snow-covered roadway with a wall on his right. The wall is the boundary of the Old Jewish Cemetery. The ornate front beyond it is the Museum of Decorative Arts, and the street is 17. listopadu, four hundred metres of tram rails between the Rudolfinum and náměstí Jana Palacha.
The street name is one of three the Czech state film commission lists for this production. It lists no buildings, and it does not say which end of the street was used. Which end, and which wall, comes from a Prague guide who worked it out of the frames.
Two policemen wake a man asleep on a bench, and in a few seconds he has taken both their guns off them. It is the first time he and the audience find out what he can do.
The river behind the policemen is the Vltava, and the National Theatre shows on the far right for a moment. Kampa is an island park below the Charles Bridge, four hundred metres of lawn and old trees with no gates on it. Which bench is not recorded anywhere, and the park is on the film commission's list of three.
Petschek Palace on the corner of Politickych veznu and Washingtonova in 2012. Built for a bank, taken over by the Gestapo, and today part of the Ministry of Industry and Trade; in the film it is the Zurich bank that holds Bourne's box.
The Gemeinschaft Bank of Zurich, where the box is. The exterior only: Bourne looks across at the building, then walks away from it with the State Opera at the far end of the street.
He is walking away from a bank. Max Spielmann built the palace between 1923 and 1929 for the banking house of Petschek and company, with safes set into concrete walls in the basement, and the city tourist board says nobody ever tried to rob them. The Petscheks sold up and emigrated before the occupation. From 1939 the Gestapo ran the Protectorate out of the building, with cells and interrogation rooms in the same basement as the vaults. The Ministry of Industry and Trade has had the place since 1993.
The street is film-commission material. The building is not. Two sources name it and neither one is production-side: an encyclopedia sentence with no footnote, and the Prague guide. The ministry published a list of seven productions shot inside the palace in 2024 and this film is not among them, though nothing in the film happens inside.
Every interior in the picture was shot in Prague, Liman says. He does not say in which studio, and no other source names one.
Panska 7, the Kounic Palace, whose ground floor has housed a Mucha museum since 1998. It is named as the door Bourne walks through into the United States consulate — by one self-published source only.
The consulate door. Bourne shows a guard his passport under the Stars and Stripes and goes in; the inside of the building is not the inside of the consulate. The address is Panská 7, the Kounic Palace, whose ground floor has held a Mucha museum since 1998.
One self-published guide names it and nothing else does. The same guide puts two more moments within fifty metres: the queue waiting outside the consulate, and the deal for a ride in Marie's Mini, on the short street V Cípu. The guards inside the consulate scenes are said to have been played by serving Marine security guards, a claim that runs back to a Marine Corps news item and stops there.
Senovážné náměstí 13
Senovazne namesti 13, built as a mortgage bank and now a hotel. In the film Bourne comes down its outside wall after leaving the consulate.
The arched carriage gateway on the left of the same building — the ornate gate that shows for a few frames when the guard looks down after Bourne's escape.
Ten frames. The guard opens the emergency door after the escape, looks down, and there is an ornate gateway, a tram line, a large building opposite. The guide worked at those ten frames until he came out at Senovážné náměstí 13, at the arched carriage gate on the left of the front.
The building is not in question: put up as a mortgage bank, listed as a cultural monument, now the Carlo IV hotel. The film connection is one man's frame-by-frame reading, he says so himself, and nobody has confirmed it since.
Eight kilometres from Wenceslas Square, in France
Trojanův mlýn, Suchdol
The yard of Trojan's Mill in Suchdol, on the northern edge of Prague. This is the farmhouse in the French countryside where Bourne and Marie hide.
The farmhouse where Bourne and Marie hide with her friend Eamon, and where the sniper comes for them across the fields, is a mill on the Únětice brook at the northern edge of Prague. The same shoot that was turning Prague into Zurich drove out here to turn it into France.
A family bought the mill in 1997 and rents it for weddings, events and shoots. The culture ministry concluded in 2003 that the foundation is medieval and the buildings kept growing on it into the twentieth century; it has been a protected monument since 30 May of that year. The film credit reached print in 2015, when the place went on the market and two newspapers, one American and one Czech, told their readers what it had played.
A public path runs along the brook past the yard, part of the Roztocký háj – Tichá údolí nature trail. The board at stop 8 tells walkers that a television series was shot at the mill in the early 1970s, with Miroslav Horníček and Jiří Sovák in it, and says nothing at all about the American film. A heritage catalogue and a Czech business daily add Bestiář, Hlava – ruce – srdce, Signál and Místo zločinu Plzeň to the mill's list; the American paper adds the series Missing. None of those has a page here.
Liman explained the Mini chase weeks before the film opened. It starts in front of the Gare du Nord and then runs on pieces shot all over the city, so that "anyone who really knows Paris will find it illogical", though he claimed a fair amount of logic for it anyway.
Almost all of it was second unit, and the second unit could not work when it wanted to. A strictly enforced 33-hour week and no overtime left them Sundays and some Saturdays, across the whole time the production was in Paris. The station front they start from is Hittorff's, finished in 1864, facing rue de Dunkerque.
The same road in January 2017, four months after the central right-bank stretch was closed to cars. A tunnel that used to carry traffic, with a skater in it.
Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The Mini goes down onto the riverside road under the quais and drives it against the traffic. Which part of it is not established. The road runs about thirteen kilometres along the right bank, and the only thing tying it to this film is a database entry with nothing behind it. The chase is on the record from the director. This piece of it is not, and the point on the map above means this road, not this spot.
Half the road cannot be driven now. The central stretch, from the Tuileries tunnel to the quai Henri-IV, was closed to cars in the autumn of 2016 and is a walking and cycling park; the courts upheld the closure in October 2018. West of the tunnel the traffic still runs, on one lane since 2017.
More Paris addresses are in circulation and none of them is on the map above: the Pont Neuf, the Pont des Arts, the place du Marché-Sainte-Catherine as the Treadstone office, the hôtel Regina, rue de Rivoli, La Défense. Behind that list stand a private blog and a record in the French national film commission's database, which would have settled it. The record is gone. The old address returns a 404, the commission's current site finds nothing for the film, and the hotel's own website does not mention it. Some of those places are probably right. Liman named one more himself, and no street in it: Belleville, which he wanted for the mix of people living there and called the real Paris, as against the tourist version.
The first ten minutes
Calata Cuneo, the port of Oneglia
Calata Cuneo, the arcaded quay of the port of Oneglia in Imperia. Bourne walks along this front in the first ten minutes of the film, after the trawler puts him ashore.
Photo: Tony Frisina at Italian Wikipedia · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Before any of the substitutions, an Italian trawler comes in past a pier with a lighthouse on it, carrying a man it pulled out of the sea. He walks the port and takes his first steps on dry land there.
The port is Oneglia, the eastern half of Imperia in Liguria, joined to Porto Maurizio by royal decree in 1923. Calata Cuneo is its pedestrian quay: a row of tall coloured houses with arcades along the ground floor, cafés and bars under them, and two piers off the end of it. The longer of the two, the one with the lighthouse, can be walked.
The last scene
Sea Satin Market, Mykonos
Sea Satin Market at Alefkandra on Mykonos, below the windmills. Marie's scooter rental in the last scene of the film is this restaurant.
Marie has spent the money on a scooter rental on the waterfront, Bourne finds her there, and the camera lifts away from the two of them over the water. The shop is a restaurant with a scooter rental put on it for the day.
Sea Satin Market sits on the rocks at Alefkandra at the western edge of Mykonos Town, under the Kato Myli windmills, and it is a restaurant still. Damon came to the island for the first time in May 2001 for this shoot; the crew worked in several parts of it and kept quiet about it, and this is the one address anyone named. In the summer of 2023 the Greek press reported that he had asked to eat there.
