The Macau casino in this film is a boat in Hong Kong. Filming anywhere near gaming tables is illegal in Macau, so the production built the gaming room inside the Jumbo Floating Restaurant in Aberdeen Harbour and ferried the equipment out to it on sampans.
25
places on the route
Eleven of the places are around Chicago and seven in San Francisco — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Most of the map works that way, because Steven Soderbergh would not use a studio. He wanted the picture to look like the thing it describes, so almost every interior in it is a real room somewhere. The Minneapolis where the Emhoffs live is the North Shore of Chicago; the hospital where Beth dies is an emptied hospital in Elgin, Illinois; the corridors of the CDC are an office park in Downers Grove; Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway is a lakefront road in Waukegan with almost no traffic on it. The only thing built from nothing was a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, with pressurised rooms, steel doors on inflatable gaskets and a disinfectant shower in the air lock. San Francisco is where the film stops pretending: Krumwiede's city plays itself, streets and rubbish and all. Some of this you can walk into, and some of it is no longer there.
The casino had to be a boat
Jumbo Floating Restaurant, Shum Wan Pier Drive, Aberdeen Harbour, Hong Kong Island
The Jumbo Floating Restaurant lit up at dusk in Aberdeen Harbour, Hong Kong, photographed in October 2010, weeks after the film unit built a Macau casino inside it.
The Jumbo Floating Restaurant on fire in Aberdeen, Hong Kong, 30 October 1971, while still under construction.
Photo: “Hong Kong 1971” published by Information Services Department 政府新聞處《香港一九七一年》年報 · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The casino floor. The production wanted a real Macau gaming room, could not have one, and rebuilt it inside a restaurant that had been in Aberdeen Harbour since the early 1970s. Jumbo caught fire in October 1971, while it was still being built, and it stayed in that water until 2022.
Films came to it: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Jackie Chan's The Protector (1985), The God of Cookery (1996), and the anime Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1992), which drew the boat rather than filmed it. The other floating restaurant in the same harbour, the Tai Pak, is a different boat with its own credits.
Jumbo closed in March 2020, was towed out of Hong Kong in June 2022 and capsized in the South China Sea days later. What is there now is open water and the Shum Wan pier it used to be moored off.
Star Ferry, Tsim Sha Tsui to Central crossing
Two Star Ferries passing in Victoria Harbour on the crossing between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
A scene shot aboard the ferry on the crossing from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. The studio's notes give the airport, the hotel and the hospital as addresses; the ferry is the one they describe as a scene, and even here nobody names the boat or the day.
InterContinental Hong Kong, 18 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
The low waterfront block of the Regent Hong Kong, called the InterContinental when the film shot there, on the Kowloon shore of Victoria Harbour.
Named by the production as a practical location, with no scene attached to it in anything we read. It stands on the Kowloon waterfront facing Hong Kong Island, two minutes' walk from the ferry pier the crew also used.
The name has moved twice around the shoot: the Regent until 2001, the InterContinental when the unit was here in 2010, and the Regent again since 2022. Other productions the hotel claims: the miniseries Noble House (1988) and the TV film Nightwatch (1995), both with Pierce Brosnan, Dynasty (1985), Borgen (2012), Better Late Than Never (2016), and Lost in Hong Kong (2015), which shot in the Presidential Suite. That list comes from the hotel's own publicity, which is enough to say the crews were there and not enough to say what they shot.
Princess Margaret Hospital, Lai King, Kwai Chung, New Territories
The covered approach to Princess Margaret Hospital in Kwai Chung, Hong Kong: a sign points right to the hospital and left to Kwai Chung Hospital next door. The hospital blocks themselves are behind the camera.
The airport Beth Emhoff passes through on her way home. It is on the production's list of practical locations without a terminal, a pier or a scene beside it.
Tsuen Wan Chinese Permanent Cemetery, Kwai Chung, New Territories
The terraced graves of Tsuen Wan Chinese Permanent Cemetery climbing the hillside above Kwai Chung, Hong Kong.
The hostage exchange at the end of the kidnapping story is placed here by one line in one place: the caption under a photograph in the film's English encyclopaedia entry, which carries no source. The studio notes do not mention the cemetery, the cemetery's own entry does not mention the film, and no Hong Kong source we could reach says anything either way. Take it as thin.
Graves stand in terraces up a hillside above the Rambler Channel, facing the container port. The Board of Management of the Chinese Permanent Cemeteries runs it, and it takes visitors, with the roads closed to cars at Ching Ming and Chung Yeung.
Minneapolis is on the North Shore
John G. Shedd Aquarium, 1200 South DuSable Lake Shore Drive, Chicago
The John G. Shedd Aquarium on Chicago's Museum Campus, the white marble rotunda facing Lake Michigan.
The American shoot started here on 19 October 2010, when the aquarium closed early to let the unit in. The white marble rotunda on the lakefront is playing Minneapolis, which is how most of the American shoot went.
The Emhoff house, in the film a home in Edina outside Minneapolis, in fact a private house on a tree-lined block in Glencoe. The Chicago Film Office named the 500 block and not the number, and we have left it there: people live in it. One of the producers, Michael Shamberg, grew up a couple of blocks away.
The woods where Mitch goes after his daughter are a harder problem. The film office called them the Robert Everly Wildlife Sanctuary, near the Glencoe Park District. No sanctuary of that name appears in OpenStreetMap, in the gazetteers we searched or in any encyclopaedia. Either it goes by something else or the name came out wrong, and until somebody finds it there is no point putting it on a map.
Glencoe's other screen credits belong to the village rather than to this street, and they rest on hobbyist film lists rather than on anything from the productions: Sixteen Candles (1984), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), and the village railway station in She's Having a Baby (1988) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).
Central Elementary School, 910 Central Avenue, Wilmette
The Emhoff children's school. A working public elementary school on the North Shore, standing in for suburban Minnesota, and Matt Damon afterwards sat for an interview and a photo call with the school's own newspaper, which is written by the third and fourth grades.
The University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview: the hospital where Beth Emhoff dies and where her son follows her. It was empty when the crew arrived. Sherman Hospital had moved to a new building on Randall Road at the end of 2009 and left this one standing vacant, which is why a film unit could have an intensive care unit and an operating room to itself.
The building has since been demolished, and the city of Elgin says so plainly. In March 2020 the state named the old Sherman campus at Slade Avenue and Center Street among the sites to be opened for overflow COVID-19 patients. What was actually fitted out, according to the city, was the medical office building next door at 901 Center Street, the hospital itself being already gone.
Downtown Western Springs, the 4400 block of Wolf Road
The looted supermarket. A false shopfront reading Gold Medal Market went up over the empty Tischler's grocery, and Mitch and Jory Emhoff go in for supplies and come out past a sick woman. The alley next door, beside what had been Breens cleaners, is the Lake City Mutual bank whose windows the looters break; the two of them run off through the car park of the Western Springs Baptist Church towards Johnson Avenue. The church was where the crew went to get warm. Damon's trailer stood on Franklin Avenue.
A neighbour who watched the fake front go up wrote in a local blog that she liked the new look, and that it made her wish someone would open a real grocery there again. No source we read gives the street number of Tischler's; the block is the one beside the Baptist church.
Chicago plays Chicago, with the people taken out
General Richard L. Jones Armory, 5324 South Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago
The makeshift infirmary where Kate Winslet's Dr Erin Mears sets up: rows of cots under a drill hall roof, and the largest set built for the picture. This is a working National Guard armory on the South Side, and the drill floor is the reason it was chosen. It is one unobstructed room, big enough to hold the whole infirmary in a single shot.
Amstutz Expressway, Waukegan
The Amstutz Expressway heading north at Grand Avenue in Waukegan, Illinois — the empty lakefront road that played the Dan Ryan.
The Dan Ryan Expressway, emptied: a military convoy moving through a depopulated city while two Illinois National Guard Black Hawks make low passes over it. The road was closed for twenty-four hours, from Greenwood Avenue south to Genesee Street, with traffic pushed onto Sheridan Road.
The Amstutz is a short lakefront expressway that was built to meet a highway that never arrived, so it carries almost nothing, and a unit working forty miles north of Chicago can close it for a day.
Henry Ford II Memorial Bridge, Torrence Avenue over the Calumet River, Chicago
The Calumet River in Chicago from the air. The tall steel truss in the middle is the Chicago & Western Indiana railway lift bridge; the road crossing at the bottom of the frame is Torrence Avenue on the Henry Ford II Memorial Bridge.
The road block. Mitch Emhoff's confrontation with federal authorities as he tries to get back into the city, in the film a state line, shot at night in real freezing rain.
The bridge is the only city-owned vertical lift bridge in Chicago: the middle span goes straight up instead of folding, and it goes up more than a hundred times a month for ships on the Calumet. It was built in 1938 and rebuilt in 2011 and 2012, the year after the film used it.
On the studio's list of locations and in the film's encyclopaedia entry, with nothing said about what was shot at either. In the story, the layover on the way back from Hong Kong is Chicago's own airport rather than a stand-in for anywhere.
Midway International Airport, 5700 South Cicero Avenue, Chicago
Named in the same breath as O'Hare by both the studio and the encyclopaedia, and neither says which airport got which scene.
Atlanta is an office park in Downers Grove
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta
The headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Clifton Road, Atlanta — the campus the film was allowed to shoot from outside and no further.
Photo: Nrbelex at nl.en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 2.5 · Wikimedia Commons
The CDC in this film is the CDC, from outside. The campus is restricted, so the crew got the exteriors, the parking garage and the reception area of the museum on the site, and no further. They were there on 6 January 2011 and tied up the traffic on Clifton Road.
The campus is closed to the public. The David J. Sencer CDC Museum on it takes visitors under its own rules.
Sara Lee corporate headquarters, Lacey Road, Downers Grove
Everything the CDC would not give up. The corridors and offices behind Laurence Fishburne's Dr Cheever, and the rooms where the military response is run, are a corporate headquarters in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Sara Lee broke itself up and left the building in the years after the film, and we did not establish what is in it now. The source names the road and not the number, so this is a campus and not a doorway.
San Francisco plays San Francisco
Genentech Hall, 600 16th Street, UCSF Mission Bay
The UCSF Mission Bay campus seen from the Third Street garage; Genentech Hall, renamed Mendel Hall for the film, is the second building from the left.
Mendel Hall in the film, renamed for the occasion: the laboratory where Elliott Gould's Dr Sussman keeps growing the virus after being told to destroy his samples, and where Krumwiede comes to confront him. In life it is a research building holding UCSF's structural biology and biochemistry labs, and in 2018 the university's postdoctoral association screened the film in it.
The studio's own notes put the scene at the University of San Francisco at Mission Creek, which blends two institutions into one address. The University of San Francisco is a private university on the other side of town, and Mission Creek is the water beside this campus. UCSF's own people name the building.
Taylor Street between Filbert and Union, North Beach, San Francisco
Columbus Avenue in North Beach, San Francisco.
Photo: InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The city months into the collapse. The production designer, Howard Cummings, had rubbish and laundry piled the length of the block as if it had been thrown out of the windows by people getting rid of anything that might carry the virus, and Jude Law's Krumwiede walks through it in a home-made hazmat suit. North Beach residents came out on a Sunday in February 2011 and found their street under it.
De Haro Street between 20th Street and Southern Heights Avenue, Potrero Hill, San Francisco
The downtown skyline standing up behind Potrero Hill — the background that made the block worth filming.
The second street dressed with rubbish, and the one chosen for its gradient: the block drops away with the downtown towers standing up behind it. The studio notes and the neighbourhood paper both say Potrero Hill and stop; the block itself is named in a single line that gives no source, and it is the only one we have.
The hill's own newspaper has gone through its screen history address by address. Bullitt (1968) used San Francisco General. Harry Callahan is written as a Potrero Hill boy in Dirty Harry (1971), which finds a body at Texas and Sierra. Mike Stone's house in The Streets of San Francisco (1972) is 768 De Haro, the one credit that stands on this street. Harry Caul's workshop in The Conversation (1974) is Suite 36 of the American Roofing building at 1616 16th Street. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) grew its pods in Building 6 at the Pier 70 shipyard. The Victorian at 1243 19th Street plays 275 Pacific Street in Pacific Heights (1990). The Joy Luck Club (1993) is at 610 Rhode Island, Sweet November (2001) at 298 Missouri, Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) at 18th and Missouri, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) dressed the Anchor Brewing building on Mariposa Street as a police station. The 700 block of San Bruno Avenue is in Godzilla (2014), and the same paper reckons it is probably the only genuine San Francisco exterior in that film.
Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
The sunken oval of the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
Photo: Tobias Kleinlercher / Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The Spreckels bandshell on the Music Concourse, photographed in 1902, three years after it was built.
Photo: Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
A scene in the park. The concourse is the sunken oval between the de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences, with the Spreckels bandshell closing the west end since 1899, and it is the most formal ground in a park otherwise built to look wild.
Whether the scene is here rather than somewhere else in four kilometres of park hangs on one sentence that gives no source. The studio notes say Golden Gate Park and nothing more precise.
The park's other credits are spread across it and mostly nowhere near this oval: Dirty Harry (1971) at Kezar Stadium, Harold and Maude (1971) at the Conservatory of Flowers, the opening of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Spock's casket in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), filmed in an overgrown corner with smoke machines, football in Hellman Hollow in The Room (2003), the Children's Playground in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), the opening of The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Always Be My Maybe (2019). The one that is genuinely on the concourse is the oldest: The Lineup (1958), inside the Steinhart Aquarium.
Chinatown is on the film's location list with nothing attached to it. The man in charge of casting the extras said before the shoot that the work would take in a location near Chinatown, which is a different statement, and nobody names a street.
San Francisco City Hall and Civic Center Plaza, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco City Hall behind the open ground of the Civic Center, where the crowd scenes of the collapse were filmed in February 2011.
11 February 2011: hundreds of extras in flu masks on the plaza in front of the dome, with military vehicles parked around them. More than two thousand San Franciscans were cast as background over roughly ten days of filming in the city, paid $139 a day if they were in the union and $64 if they were not.
City Hall has been carrying scenes for decades. Dirty Harry (1971) shot inside the Mayor's office, and after it came The Towering Inferno (1974), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Foul Play (1978), the Grand Staircase standing in for a Washington government building in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), A View to a Kill (1985), Milk (2008) and the television series The Man in the High Castle (2015). The building took some damage for Bicentennial Man (1999), when ten-thousand-watt lamps set off the sprinklers and flooded part of it.
Candlestick Park, 602 Jamestown Avenue, San Francisco
Candlestick Park part-demolished in May 2015, four years after the film staged its vaccination centre on the field.
The mass vaccination centre: tents, military vehicles and about a thousand extras on the field of a football stadium. A helicopter was to come down among them, and whether it did is not something either account we read settles. This was the last thing the production shot, in February 2011.
Candlestick had taken the climax of Experiment in Terror (1962) and of Freebie and the Bean (1974), The Enforcer (1976), a Giants game in Getting Even with Dad (1994), a missile diverted away from it in The Rock (1996), The Fan the same year, and the finish line of the sixteenth season of The Amazing Race in 2010.
Soderbergh would not build a set, so his crew went out and borrowed real rooms. Not all of them are still standing. The stadium came down across 2014 and 2015, and the restaurant that held the casino was towed out of Aberdeen Harbour in June 2022 and capsized in the South China Sea days later.
