hello focus fans welcome to real destinations where we tour the locations that make our
favorite movies look and feel real and it's been a little while but
we are excited to be back on the road once again and in our favorite city hello london
so what brings you down then i'm studying london college of fashion
last night in soho follows young eloise an aspiring fashion designer who moves
to the city to chase her dreams but these dreams soon turn to nightmares
as eloise starts to have visions that bleed into her reality where are you
coming whenever i'm in a new city i always love to check out the local bar scene and
luckily last night in soho is set right in the middle of london's thriving nightlife and
who better to give me a tour of the locations than the co-writers christy wilson cams and
edgar wright hi guys hi hello should we check out the toucan of course okay follow me
welcome to the toucan now from that name you might be expecting some kind of tropical
tiki bar but this popular irish pub was named after the guinness toucan so cheers guys
cheers edgar tell me about the initial idea for this film and how much was it driven by
the fact that you wanted to shoot here in soho in the 27 years i've lived in london
i think i've spent more time in soho than any other neighborhood it really is like to me the
sort of heart of london and the darker heart of the city as well the two kind of co-exist
in plain sight so it's a source of much obsession if i could live any place and
anytime i'd live here in london in the 60s when i came here for film school i lived above a
strip club on dean street and i worked here at the toucan for about five years so i had lived
some of the film both the cdr aspects of it and like the showbiz side of it
tell us a little bit about the history of the two camps i know in the 60s it was a great restaurant
yeah it was a great restaurant jimi hendrix played here it was like one of the hot music spots
and it's a very small pub so it's like sometimes you're like yeah how did that sit in here
action we recreated this bar at ealing studios and it looked very very similar i think actually
we stole quite a lot of the stuff from the walls and put it onto the set especially a
lot of the guinness memorabilia the vintage stuff the scenes that we shot in the real bar upstairs
and we obviously shoot outside and we also shoot the kind of the stairs going out to the street
which when i was setting up the shot terrance stamp said you're not gonna use this shot in
the movie are you i said yeah why not and he goes this doesn't belong on the cinema screen
i'm on goose place number eight
here we are on gouge place the location of ms collins townhouse this street makes several
appearances in the film and as you can see this shop was remade into a french bistro complete with
a flashing neon light that bathes eloise's bedroom in dramatic colours i thought rather than have
her in soho it'd be interesting to have her in pizzeria because a lot of students live in fitzroy
and then the london college of fashion itself is one of those amazing like brutalist buildings
from the early 60s we use the real building inside and out in the movie which is probably the busiest
place in london is it difficult seeing how soho is such an active place when we were talking about
actually filming the movie we sort of wanted to take the ball by the hall and say no let's
actually shoot it in soho and that's tough because soho was 24 7. so it required an enormous amount
of planning i'm really proud that we didn't have to fake soho anywhere else you know killer it is
there's a proper witching error in soho after midnight the kind of whole chemistry
sort of changes and it immediately feels kind of like sort of different
this is newman's passage a historic alleyway where eloise finds herself in a horrific situation
any soho night your chances of running into somebody who is
pretending to be something they're not is high it's closed not for you
some of the iconic scenes in the film take place in impressive cabaret theaters like the fictional
rialto set here on greek street can't wait to get back in there it's no cafe de perry
but the very real and quite famous cafe de paris is the setting for one of the
most significant sequences in the film when eloise first crosses into the past
and quite literally follows in sandy's footsteps we didn't use the real exterior because the
actual street is quite kind of narrow and we needed a big approach to it so we used
a different cinema on the haymarket marcus roland our amazing production
created the cafe perry entrance we put that big thunderbolt marquee up and then apparently
quite a few people tried to buy tickets for thunderball because they thought it was playing
the actual cafe parry has a nightclub that's downstairs so we shot that as a stage
and we made it a little bit bigger than the real one
just to sort of accommodate some of the camera shots we wanted to do
i walked with dame diana rigg the late dino rig to the cafe to paris set and she saw it and she
sort of had this kind of moment of reverie where she goes oh it looks amazing she goes
it looks exactly like it did oh you must tell your production design he did an amazing job
i can't believe it i can there are people who walk around a city and never think about the past
and there are people like me and christy who walk around the city and can't think of anything else
i just love soho and and to create a time capsule of it and it was like you know the
bar i worked in the street i lived on it was very surreal that all these locations were
used and i i get to watch the film and be like i know that place yeah yeah it's special well
christy wilson cams and edgar wright thank you so much thank you cheers almost finished down it
it's not it's not that great to down a half fine again
as always london proves herself to be a cinematic backdrop for a focus features film
and make sure you check out last night in soho to see all of these dazzling locations
now playing only in theaters and stay tuned to visit some new locations in our upcoming
episodes i'm alicia malone i'll see you at the next real destination bye
you