Twin City
BY Matt Semansky
Illustration by Rob Elliott/Swizzle
From Mary Pickford in the silent era to the not-so-silent exploits of Jim Carrey, Canada has consistently exported its film talent to Hollywood. Yet some of the country’s best performers aren’t actors—or even human. In fact, Canadian cities and towns have a rich history of “playing” international locations on celluloid.
It’s not just the nation’s biggest cities that have taken star turns either. It’s well-known that Toronto does a good Chicago, having stood in for the mid-American metropolis in Adventures in Babysitting, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and, most ironically, Chicago—but Winnipeg has also played the role. The Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez vehicle, Shall We Dance, was shot in and around the ’Peg in 2003, where locations such as the Exchange District doubled for the Windy City.
While it’s not hard to see how our big, grey cities fill in for big, grey cities to the south, Canada has also convincingly played more exotic locales. Take The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, in which scenes set in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, were actually filmed in the desert-like climate of Schalles Ranch near Ashcroft, B.C. In fact, the country’s diverse geography attracts a broad range of films to different regions. Calgary and Edmonton donned the costume of Syracuse, New York, for the Chevy Chase film, Snow Day, and more recently Brad Pitt made Alberta his temporary home while playing the legendary Jesse James. Meanwhile, the Maritimes often substitute for New England locations, as in Two If By Sea. Montreal is so chic that it actually got to play itself in The Score. Ditto for Quebec City in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess.
It seems like no matter what a script calls for, there’s a Canadian location that can set the scene with a little help from the art department. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s cheaper to shoot here.
