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 Traveller 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 electrifying opening scene at the US-Mexico border (more on that below), we follow the French 75 to the anonymous city where 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.
El Paso, Texas
Bob eventually makes his way to Baktan Cross’s downtown, a stark urban contrast to his peaceful home. This part of the city was actually filmed all around El Paso, Texas, right on the border with Mexico. “I just got to see [the movie] in El Paso,” Martin says, “They were really excited to see it on the screen.” Even more so than Sacramento, El Paso is an American city that has yet to be given a spot on the big screen, but that changes here. There’s chaos in the city – a riot is on, and Bob needs to move through it undetected. In doing so, we get a grand tour of the Sunset Heights neighbourhood by way of its rooftops and back alleys. Says Martin, “It’s this historic neighbourhood that leads right to the border, about four blocks of stores run by intergenerational families from Mexico who open the flower shop, the party shop, the perfume store. There's just a richness there. The first time we scouted, we ended at Perfumeria Genesis, Sensei’s family’s storefront. We were just incredibly fortunate that that entire second floor of this historic building was gutted, and we built that whole apartment right upstairs.”
Borrego Springs, California, and the Texas Dip
The film’s climactic chase sequence along a desert road that goes up and down, up and down is just plain cool, and it’s a real stretch of highway stitched with a few other nearby locales. Of the process of piecing that geography together, and using it for an earlier sequence as well, Martin says, “[Michael] took us to a great road that actually it didn't end up in the film, but that opened our eyes to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Borrego Springs, Ocotillo Wells and Blythe. We drove out to the furthest point that you could probably get, I think, to the border, which is where we found the camp for the 76 [at the beginning of the film.] It was important that there was no water in this film except for that moment, which is such an important separation between the United States and Mexico with the river and that arid topography and terrain.”
On the return trip came the discovery of the road, she says: “As we were leaving Blythe, heading back to Borrego Springs, we got on this highway that started to descend and ascend, and all of a sudden we all just stopped and said, ‘So this is something really special.’ We’d been all the way up through Bishop and gone to many places and this was our ‘aha’ moment. We stitched that road with the Texas Dip in Borrego Springs, about an hour away, and also used this big rock outcropping [in Anza Borrego] that I call ‘The Reef.’ The desert allowed us that kind of flexibility.”
This article was first published on Condé Nast Traveler.