In 2019, director Jonathan Levine, the same man who brought us movies like “The Night Before” and “Snatched,” teamed up with Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen to bring us a comedy romance film called Long Shot. Today, we’re going to take a look at where Levine, his cast, and crew went to make this rom-com chick flick happen.
Produced by Summit Entertainment and distributed by Lionsgate, it isn’t quite the box-office hit you’d expect from an Academy-Award winner actress like Theron. The movie barely raked in $53 million against a $40 million budget. Still, with the participation of other cast members like “Breaking Bad” Bob Odenkirk and The Lord of The Ring’s “Gollum” Andy Serkis, it is a fun movie to watch.
Long Shot Filming Locations
Long Shot is a romantic comedy that tells us the life of a chaotic and utter failure of a journalist (Seth Rogen) who happens to stumble back upon his crush from earlier years (Charlize Theron).
As it turns out, Theron’s character ends up becoming a successful politician and hires Rogen’s character to helm her public relations team. What ensues is a romance and a comedy of failures that makes you laugh your heart out.
Filmed between November 2017 and January 2018, Long Shot was filmed between Canada and Colombia. The main cinematographer for this flick is Yves Bélanger, the same man who worked with Academy Award-winner Clint Eastwood in the 2018 drama “The Mule” and 2019’s Eastwood movie “Richard Jewell”, as well as other films like 2015’s “Brooklyn”. Now, let’s take a trip to Canada and Colombia to see where did they shot this movie.
Montreal
The bulk of this romantic comedy was filmed in Montreal, Canada. Montreal is one of the largest cities in Canada, located in Québec. While the storyline makes us believe that we’re in Washington DC, where Charlize Theron’s character is working as a top US government official and she hires Seth Rogen’s character’s there, the producers chose Montreal because of several factors.
Firstly, Montreal is a very friendly city for filmmakers, it has a bustling entertainment industry, it has arts and film colleges of great prestige, and its authorities bolster the local economy but giving incentives to the filmmakers and producers that move there to shoot their productions because they ask them to employ very talented local experts. Movies like “The Day After Tomorrow”, “Catch Me If You Can”, “Once Upon A Time In America,” and “Taking Lives” were all filmed in Montreal.
In the movie, we’re led to believe that we’re in the White House, but it is actually a place called the Windsor Ballroom in Rue Peel.
The indoor scenes that we see of government offices where Theron Rogen and other cast members have many dialogues were filmed at the Sun Life Building on Metcalfe Street. It was chosen because it shares the same neoclassical architectural style that you see in the United States’s capitol, the interior of the White House and other big US federal government buildings.
Furthermore, thanks to the magic of movies, some outdoor scenes in Montreal were doctored to make us believe that we’re in Washington DC’s busiest downtown streets, when in fact, those scenes were filmed in streets like Rue Saint-Paul East as well as the Old Montreal district.
Cartagena
As the movie unfolds, so does the romance between Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen’s characters, and we move from way up north in Canada to the sunny Caribbean shores of Cartagena, Colombia.
Cast and crew were spotted there filming several outdoor scenes in January 2018. Cartagena is a beautiful northeastern city with a bustling tourism industry and great incentives for filmmakers. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with cobblestone streets, beautiful Spanish-style architecture, and great locations, like the ones we see in the film, like the famous “Ciudad Amurallada”, (The Walled City).
Cartagena is also the place where great box-office hits were filmed like the latest “Sound of Freedom” film, Amazon Prime Video’s Jack Ryan Season 2, Marlon Brando’s “Burn!”, and “Love in the Time of Cholera” shot there as well.
