On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more.
One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest movie, is a rare instance of success for the “Anytown, USA” setting. Where most pictures flounder with this anonymous approach to the United States—in attempting to present a slice of it that everyone can relate to, they necessarily make up something non-specific and false—One Battle After Another makes it work with a mélange of settings that coalesce into an insane and beautiful American collage. This is an action movie loaded with chase sequences—by car on the open road, on foot over the rooftops and through the back alleys of the last city you’d expect—and there’s a lot of location on display. So, where was One Battle After Another filmed?
The answer to that question is not a short one. One Battle After Another was filmed on location in dozens of cities and sites across California and Texas. Production designer Florencia Martin (who previously spoke with us about her work on Babylon) began the scouting process in 2022, two years before shooting, in order to find authentic places that they could shoot in with minimal intervention that would take us, as she puts it, “from the redwoods to the desert.” Alongside supervising location manager Michael Glaser, she visited more than 25 cities in California in search of potential homes for the radical French 75 cell of which DiCaprio’s Bob is a part, as well as the sanctuary city he and his baby daughter escape to when it all falls apart.
To give us a picture of the United States she was working in, Martin sat down with Condé Nast Traveler to break down One Battle After Another’s key locations. “I feel like I could talk so much more about each person we met and each city we went to,” she says, “It was an amazing challenge.”
Sacramento, California
After an electric opening scene at the US-Mexico border (more on that below) we follow the French 75 to the anonymous city in which they are concentrating their next spate of actions—robbing banks, bombing banks, and so on. That city is actually Sacramento, the capital of California, which Martin and company landed on in part because it doesn’t have a long history in the movies—Lady Bird was a big love letter to the city, yes, but Lady Bird this is not. While that film was concentrated in Sacramento’s suburbs, One Battle After Another finds its home in the downtown, of which Martin says, “The Brutalist buildings there, the courthouses, Capitol Mall—it just suited [the French 75’s] call for action. The city was incredible and allowed us to shut down those major avenues for our car chases, and they let us do an actual practical explosion at the bank.” As far as hotels go, the exterior of the Kimpton Sawyer Hotel was used.
Humboldt County, California
When things go south for the 75, Bob takes his infant daughter Willa and flees to Baktan Cross, a fictional city that’s half-Humboldt County, half-El Paso. Let’s begin with the former, where Bob and Willa’s house sits amidst the redwoods. Martin says, “Bob’s a revolutionary, based [in part on the Weather Underground.] A lot of those people were in the Bay area, and once that revolution ended, they went up to Humboldt to go into hiding and create a new world for themselves.” They scouted over a dozen houses before landing on the one bedroom cottage that gave the impression that time had stopped—”he had this whole idea, when he first moved there, to build these elaborate tunnels and escape paths, but then nobody ever came.” Well, when they do come for him, the world of Humboldt opens up to the audience ever so slightly. We see Bob flee to Murphy’s Market in Eureka, where he makes his desperate call to French 75 on a payphone out front. Willa’s high school dance is shot at the real Eureka High School, “a huge, massive high school built for the logging community.” The school’s real students appear as the kids at the dance. Willa’s karate dojo, where she is taught by Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) is inspired by a real one in Eureka, although production wound up recreating it in El Paso.
