Miami is California. France is Quebec. New Rochelle is Yonkers. Spielberg took 147 locations in 52 days and put a great many of them to work pretending to be somewhere else, so the map of this film has very little to do with the map inside it.
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places on the route
The locations sit in three separate regions — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Eero Saarinen's terminal was dedicated on 28 May 1962. It closed in 2001, after TWA sold its assets to American Airlines, and the film came through the empty building a few months later, in the spring of 2002.
That is the whole reason the airport scenes look the way they do. The set was already there: the concrete shells, the flight tubes, the built-in furniture cast in the same material as the walls. Nobody had to build 1963, and nobody had to clear out 2002 either, because the last passenger had gone.
The headhouse reopened in 2019 as the TWA Hotel. It is the one location on this page that is easier to visit now than it was when the film was shot.
The crew worked here from 25 to 30 April 2002, on the block of Park Avenue in front of the hotel. Traffic was stopped and refilled with period cars and taxis, and everything in frame had to read as forty years earlier. The production called it the hardest location on the schedule.
The hotel has its own filmography. The Godfather Part III shot here in 1990. Week-End at the Waldorf did it the other way round in 1945: some of the hotel was filmed on location and the rest, including the lobby and the Starlight Roof, was rebuilt on the MGM backlot in Culver City.
The Waldorf closed on 1 March 2017 for a renovation that turned the upper floors into apartments. Guest rooms reopened in July 2025 and the ballroom in September.
Frank Abagnale grew up in New Rochelle and the film says so repeatedly. None of it was shot there.
Three scenes were shot in Yonkers instead, all in a single day, with a crew of 150. Hanratty makes a phone call from a booth in Larkin Park. There is a laundromat at 151 Lake Avenue. DiCaprio runs down the stretch of Buena Vista Street between numbers 100 and 108. The city's film office put the day's take at about $100,000, of which $25,000 to $30,000 went straight back out as overtime for police, fire and public works.
Yonkers had a good year in 2002. Maid in Manhattan, School of Rock and Mona Lisa Smile all shot there as well.
Quebec City was picked for atmosphere, and Place Royale, the stone square in the Lower Town, plays the French village of Montrichard. Frank is cornered here. The real Frank Abagnale appears in the scene.
The church in the background of the arrest is Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, on the east side of the square. Of everything on this page, the square is the location that has changed least since the crew left.
Montrichard exists, in the Loir-et-Cher. It is where Frank's mother is from, it is named in the dialogue, and no camera ever went there.
The Miami airport where Frank walks out through a crowd of flight attendants sits 3,700 km from Miami, in San Bernardino County. The production used the old airport at Ontario for it.
Ontario has been doing this for eighty years. The Best Years of Our Lives filmed here in 1946. Ford v Ferrari used it for hangar scenes set at LAX. Saving Mr. Banks came through. The television series LAX shot in a vacant terminal here with a grounded Boeing 727 and cut in establishing shots of the real airport.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
A Romanesque Revival building from September 1901, now a museum run by the county parks department. Crews keep coming back for Courtroom No. One, a wood-panelled room that still has its old bench, its chandeliers and its worked ceiling, and therefore needs almost no dressing.
The county's own list of what has been shot in that room runs from Compulsion through Norma Rae, Gideon's Trumpet and Frances to Legally Blonde, released the year before this one. The exterior stood in for Briarcliff Manor in American Horror Story: Asylum.
Opened in 1921, closed to guests in 1989, demolished across 2005 and 2006. For the sixteen years in between it worked as a film set almost full time: Pretty Woman, Forrest Gump, Blow, Apollo 13, Almost Famous, The Italian Job, and this film three years before the wrecking crews arrived.
Six schools now stand on the site, named for Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot in the hotel pantry in 1968. There is nothing left to look at.
Built in 1926, opened on 15 May 1927, and still running at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, which puts it in a small group on this page. Internal Affairs and Beverly Hills Cop II filmed at the hotel; so did Knots Landing, Moonlighting and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The station opened on 3 May 1939 and has spent most of the years since playing other buildings. It was the police station in Blade Runner. It has been in The Way We Were, Bugsy, Silver Streak, Pearl Harbor, The Italian Job and, under its own name, Union Station in 1950.
A Victorian house in Altadena, an unincorporated corner of Los Angeles County, plays the Strong family home in New Orleans.
Gone
The FBI offices were an old aerospace plant in Downey where Rockwell had assembled Apollo spacecraft and Space Shuttle orbiters. By 2002 the site was running as Downey Studios. The buildings came down in October 2012 and a retail centre stands there now.
The French prison where Hanratty arrives to extradite Frank was an abandoned prison in Montreal. Shooting on the film ended in that city on 12 May 2002.
