Paris Movie Walks: A Guide for People Who Couldn’t Afford the Actual Film Set
Our man in a beret, Reginald Fotheringay-Smythe, has strapped on his sensible shoes and waddled through every park, boulevard, and existentially depressing side street in the French capital — all in the noble pursuit of identifying where Hollywood pretended Paris was Paris, when Paris was actually New Jersey.
What Are Paris Movie Walks, and Why Do They Exist?
Paris movie walks are exactly what they sound like: guided strolls through the streets of Paris, retracing the locations where famous films were shot — or, more accurately, where directors claimed they were shot whilst actually filming in a Paramount Studios car park in 1934.
As the legendary director Ernst Lubitsch — a man who set over a dozen films in Paris without ever pointing a camera at the place — once remarked: “There is Paramount-Paris and MGM-Paris, and of course the real Paris. Paramount’s is the most Parisian of all.” Which tells you everything you need to know about the French capital’s relationship with its own cinematic reputation.
Since 1900, Hollywood has produced approximately 800 films set in Paris. Eight hundred. That is not a typo. The French, who have produced approximately 800 films set in their own opinions, find this both flattering and deeply suspicious.
The Paris Movie Walks Route: A Highly Opinionated Itinerary
The canonical paris movie walks route runs from Notre Dame Cathedral to the Eiffel Tower, which is to say it runs from one enormous tourist queue to another enormous tourist queue, with a stretch of river in between where you may or may not be robbed by a charming pickpocket who is also, somehow, offering you a romantic boat tour.
Stop One: The Banks of the Seine
The Seine riverbanks are where Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll had a deeply thoughtful conversation about racial harmony in America in the 1961 film Paris Blues — at a time, as the film helpfully reminds us, when Martin Luther King was still an unknown minister in Georgia. The French, overhearing this conversation from a nearby café, presumably shrugged, ordered another pastis, and went back to arguing about cheese.
The same stretch of river between the Pont des Invalides and Pont Alexandre III hosted Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the same film, which means that in 1961 one could apparently stroll the banks of the Seine and trip over two of Hollywood’s most luminous star couples before breakfast. Today you are more likely to trip over a rental scooter.
Stop Two: Montmartre and the Rue Chappe Stairway
No paris movie walks experience is complete without the climb up to Montmartre, where Paris Blues returned for what the director apparently called a “kaleidoscopic scene” — which is film-school language for “we ran out of money for proper sets and sent everyone to wander around Montmartre looking wistful.”
The Rue Chappe stairway appears in the film. It also appears in real life, where it continues to be a stairway, doing stairway things, entirely unbothered by its cinematic legacy.
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are photographed in front of the Lapin Agile cabaret — a venue that has been trading on its bohemian reputation since approximately the time bohemianism was invented, and is now largely sustained by Americans on paris movie walks who photograph it, post it on Instagram, and eat a crêpe from a van parked outside.
Stop Three: The Jardin des Tuileries
The Tuileries Gardens sit between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, and represent the very finest example of French formal landscaping — which is to say they are geometrically perfect, slightly cold, and make you feel vaguely underdressed even in a good coat.
Metro: Concorde. Time required: however long it takes to eat a sandwich on a bench and feel sophisticated about it.
The Tuileries have survived revolutions, both political and stylistic, which means they have outlasted practically every government France has had since the 17th century, which is saying something given the French government’s attitude to longevity.
Stop Four: The Jardin du Luxembourg
Located south of the Seine near the Pantheon — which is itself worth a visit, being a large building full of dead Frenchmen who were very important and are now very quiet — the Luxembourg Gardens are where the French Senate convenes in the adjacent palace when not on strike, which narrows the calendar considerably.
The gardens feature an Italianate fountain built for Catherine de Medici, who was homesick for Italy and presumably also for a country where the plumbing worked. There are also English-style winding paths, because the French, despite everything, are not immune to occasionally nicking someone else’s ideas and claiming them as their own.
Stop Five: Parc Monceau — The Bijou Park
Two blocks east of the Arc de Triomphe (Metro: Monceau), the Parc Monceau is Paris’s “bijou park” — which the guidebooks mean as a compliment and the French mean as a description of something small enough to be finished before lunch. It has a lake, a forest, and a stream with a bridge, all in miniature, like someone built a full park and then shrank it in the wash.
It was the first Parisian park laid out in the English style, which means it was designed by someone who had been to England, looked at the weather, and thought: yes, but what if we did this somewhere people actually wanted to go?
Paris Movie Walks and the Films That Actually Filmed There
Paris Blues (1961): The One Without the Eiffel Tower
Paris Blues holds a distinction unique in the entire history of Hollywood Paris films: it is the only major Hollywood film set in Paris that does not feature a single shot of the Eiffel Tower. They mention it, mostly as shorthand for “tourist Paris,” but it never appears on screen. In 1961, this was daring. In 2025, an Instagram influencer visiting Paris without photographing the Eiffel Tower would simply cease to exist.
The film stars Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, and Diahann Carroll, and features an original score by Duke Ellington, which means it is simultaneously one of the coolest films ever made and one that spent several decades unavailable on DVD. It eventually surfaced on YouTube, where it sits alongside footage of cats falling off shelves and men explaining cryptocurrency.
Midnight in Paris (2011): Woody Allen Discovers Nostalgia
The exhibition “Paris vu par Hollywood” at Paris City Hall included storyboards for Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a film about a man who walks through Paris at night and keeps accidentally falling into the 1920s, which is precisely what happens to everyone visiting Paris for the first time and slightly drunk on Burgundy.
Hugo (2011): Martin Scorsese Does Not Mess About
The same exhibition featured statues made by sculptor Dante Ferreti for Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret, which won the Academy Award for Production Design, a fact which will not surprise anyone who has seen the film and wondered how they built an entire 1930s Gare Montparnasse inside a studio without someone noticing.
Practical Advice for Your Paris Movie Walks (From Someone Who Has Done It Twice and Regrets Nothing)
Shoes: Comfortable. The Paris movie walks route involves a great deal of cobblestone, which is picturesque to photograph and catastrophic to walk on in anything with a heel. The French know this and wear sensible shoes, then deny it.
Lunch: Do not book a restaurant. Get a sandwich, find a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and eat it while watching Parisian pigeons conduct their daily operations with the focused intensity of small, grey city traders.
Wine: This is Paris. A bottle of wine on the grass is not a social problem. It is a cultural requirement. The French will respect you for it. The British tourists around you will envy you. The Americans will photograph you.
The Metro: Use it. Paris is large. Romanticism is finite. Your knees are not made of iron.
The Eiffel Tower: It exists. You may visit it if you wish. No film on this walking tour requires you to do so. Consider this liberation.
The Book: Paris Movie Walks by Michael Schuermann
The definitive guide to paris movie walks is Paris Movie Walks by Michael Schuermann, which identifies filming locations from approximately 100 Hollywood films set in the city. It is available on Amazon and was also, at time of writing, available as an iPhone app from iTunes — which places it historically alongside Angry Birds and the first generation of apps that let you turn photographs into paintings and which everyone used once and then forgot about.
Schuermann’s book was kind enough to be mentioned in the New York Times in the context of the “Paris vu par Hollywood” exhibition at Paris City Hall (entrance free, Mondays through Saturdays, 10am to 7pm — though the exhibition has since closed, in the way that all good things close, without sufficient warning).
For the serious paris movie walks pilgrim, the book remains the authoritative text. For everyone else, this article will do.
Why Paris Remains the World’s Most Cinematically Obliging City
Paris has been playing itself — and occasionally New Jersey — in the movies for over a century, and it has not tired of the arrangement. Other cities have tried. Rome has had a go. Vienna makes occasional appearances in Cold War thrillers. But none of them have managed to become quite so comprehensively themselves in cinema, quite so reliably, across quite so many genres and decades.
The reason, arguably, is that Paris is the only city in the world that agrees entirely with how Hollywood imagines it. The cafés are where they should be. The bridges do look like that. The light is, in fact, extraordinary on a winter afternoon. The pigeons are, if anything, more confident than depicted.
And so the paris movie walks pilgrim — shuffling between the Tuileries and Montmartre, squinting at a location map and eating a sandwich that is mysteriously better than any sandwich available elsewhere on earth — is not deluded. They are, for once, exactly where the films said they would be.
Which is more than can be said for Paramount-Paris.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Paris Movie Walks traces Hollywood filming locations across the French capital, from the banks of the Seine near Notre Dame to the staircases of Montmartre. The guide book Paris Movie Walks by Michael Schuermann covers approximately 100 films shot in or set in Paris since 1900 — a figure that, per the “Paris vu par Hollywood” exhibition at Paris City Hall, represents fewer than one in eight of all Hollywood Paris productions, the majority of which were filmed on studio lots in California by directors who had never visited France and were not planning to. The Tuileries, Luxembourg, Monceau, and Seine riverbanks remain the core paris movie walks route for visitors combining film tourism with a civilised afternoon outdoors.
Cyndi Himmelstiere is a satirical journalist at Prat.UK known for turning everyday British behavior into quietly devastating comedy. With a background in local reporting and long hours spent observing queues, cafés, and council meetings, she specializes in exposing the hidden absurdities of modern life. Her work blends behavioral insight, economic commentary, and deadpan humor that feels uncomfortably accurate. Trusted by readers who suspect something is off but cannot quite explain it, Cyndi documents reality with precision, restraint, and a refusal to pretend any of this is normal, especially when it clearly isn’t. She is the author of Could Modern Doctors Have Saved History’s Greats?
