CineTV Famous Movie Cities: Budapest, Hungary

New CineTV topic

Happy Monday to all the CineTV community members reading this. I don't know if you are just waking up when you read this or maybe your day is already close to being over, it's all good as we're a very diverse community with people from all over the world. This is great if you ask me, I love connecting with people from other cultures as well. It's always great to get input from people all over the world as we are not all the same, and not everyone likes the same content.

I'm a world citizen myself as I've lived in three countries now and would like to explore some other continents in the future as well. Living abroad (my home country was the tiny country called Holland), has taught me many new things and on top of that, I've also seen things I've never seen before in terms of movie sets.

These personal experiences have been my inspiration when I was brainstorming for new CineTV content to replace the Cine Kids blogs (at least partially) because there was simply too little engagement left. I think most of us know how it feels to put your heart and soul into a blog and then seeing 0 engagement, it sucks and it's not really appealing to keep doing this for a longer period of time. Therefore, I decided to shake things up a bit and think of new blogs for CineTV in the hope I can get some more people engaged.

Today I'm going to write about "Famous movie cities" for the first time. I'm not promising you a weekly or even monthly blog about the topic, as I've got a few more topics lined up which I'm excited to write about, but you can be sure that in the near future, another part about this topic will appear on the CineTV account.

Budapest

The kick-off of this series is about the Hungarian capital, namely Budapest. If you've followed my personal account in the past years while I lived in Budapest, you probably know that I have a personal love-hate relationship with the city in general. This doesn't really come forward due to the city not being interesting or because it has nothing to offer, not at all. It's a build-up of negative experiences which were also partially caused by being unlucky dealing with the wrong people at the wrong time.

Looking back, I know pretty sure that if I encountered some other people, the nasty taste of the customer service there would not have been so nasty at all meaning it could have meant that we ended up buying a home there after some years. Anyway, this blog is not about all of this, because today I want to talk about something that actually gets me really exciting and nostalgic writing about it: big movies being shot in Budapest.

One of the first "WOW" moments we had in Budapest

If you ever been to Budapest, you probably know the "WOW" feeling when standing in front of the Parliament building. It's beautiful and huge and when you stand there with the right weather, it's guaranteed to give you some goosebumps. This was our first moment of extreme excitement being there, the day after we arrived. We stayed 10 minutes from the parliament building and in front of another government building where they regularly had soldiers marching and premier Victor Orban being welcomed officially.

I used to hang out of the window of the apartment where we stayed, and watch what the fuzz was about from the second floor. Usually, I could not make much of it, unless our host told us that the prime minister was there that day and I could connect the dots.

Car racing and shouting

Another day, car racing drove me nuts. I didn't check what was happening until hours later when I found it weird that I heard the same loop of noise: car driving on high speed, taking a turn with the same high speed, squealing tires and then the same yelling followed these events. It was definitely a repetitive task. Then it hit me, our host already shared that many movies were shot in the city and that we'd see this quite often in our years to come. Could this be one of these movies sets on the streets he was talking about?

As soon as my boyfriend arrived back from work, I told him about the events and that I saw cars racing on high speed and was curious because I could not see it clear enough thanks to the trees on the corner of the street. He said let's check it out and so we went downstairs to see if we could close to the set. Many people were blocking the streets but as we lived there, we could come quite close and witness how these cars were constantly shooting scenes. We tried to get a glimpse of the actors as I was obviously hoping to see some famous actors and maybe take a selfie lol, sadly, we could not see them. I remember trying to find out which movie it was later, but my Hungarian was as bad back then as it is today, it was not until much later when someone mentioned "The Spy who dumped me" was probably the movie they were filming.

Here's a list of some of the cast members: Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux, Gillian Anderson, Hasan Minhaj, Ivanna Sakhno, and Sam Heughan.

Mila Kunis was right there, damn, missed the opportunity to meet her, what a shame as I think she's very cool.

The Spy who dumped me

I remember seeing this movie and feeling very nostalgic recognizing all these Budapest streets. And it's definitely even more special if you know some scenes are shot right in front of your home, as you know you were there to witness them shooting a whole day. When I looked up the trailer, I felt excited once again because it's one of these fun memories that not everyone has because not everyone gets to live right next to a movie set, do they?

When I saw the trailer again today I wanted to see the movie again so my next move is checking if it's on Netflix or another streaming service so that we can watch it again soon. Budapest wasn't all that bad, it's quite fun to remember the fun things.

Pop up movie sets

Budapest is not only a place for the bigger famous productions being shot there, it's also a very popular place for smaller projects being shot because we saw tons of movie sets over the 4,5 years we lived there. I personally never saw anything like this in Holland when I lived there but it may have been something I just never witnessed due to living in the "wrong" area of the country but it's been quite fun seeing these movie sets pop up over night.

When you've lived in Budapest you've surely seen this often, 10-20 meters of parking spots on the side of the road being blocked for a day or several days. When we'd cross that same point only hours later, seeing several food trucks and some tables and chairs popped up as a tiny restaurant for the crew members of these movies being shot. I've seen it in so many districts over the years and could never resist standing there to see if I could figure out what movie they were shooting or if we'd get lucky seeing a big movie star.

Sadly for me, we've never seen movie stars in person but it was very fun to see these sets pop up and then move on to the next location to repeat the whole process. It was very clear to me that the people working on these sets are very professional and do this often.

Movies shot in Budapest

While checking for movies shot during our stay in Budapest I bumped on a long list of movies that were shot there, in fact I found so much information that I would like to dedicate another part on Budapest in the future so consider this just an introduction to Budapest as a famous movie city.

Until then, here's a short list with movies you probably recognize:

My girl 2 (1994), Mortal Kombat (1995), Evita (1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1998), Spy Game ( 2001), I Spy (2002), Underworld (2003), Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008), Transporter 3 (2008), Budapest (2009), Monte Carlo (2011), Dracula (2013), A Good day to Die Hard (2013), Spy (2015), Don't breathe (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Homeland (s7) (2018), Terminal (2018), Robin Hood (2018), Terminator Dark Fate (2019), Dune (2021) and the list goes on.. Full list can be found here.

Great scenery

Having lived in Budapest, I can see why it's been a set to many movies and even music videos because many parts of the city have a charm that I never saw in another city. There are districts that look aren't appealing to live in or to visit but looking back on some movies, I can see how Budapest was the perfect spot to film certain scenes.

I remember feeling like going back to a world war zone in winter time when the weather was shit, everything felt very dark and unpleasant. I used to feel depressed in winter living there and the scenery in some parts of the city would only emphasize this. They certainly make great sets for movies that want to showcase this feeling.

Michael Jackson's history teaser

Then there are places such as Hősök Tere (heroes square) that's on everyone's list to shoot pictures, I found out today that Michael Jackson's History Teaser was shot there in 1994.

Seeing this trailer I can see what they did to make Hősök Tere look much bigger than it is, but damn, it looks impressive in this video. To be honest, it also does in real life, even if there's nothing to see, lol. I had to drive past heroes square dropping of our daughter at the kindergarten in a different part of the city and when I drove back home at 7 AM, the sun used to rise and I was always in awe passing that point.

And then there was the Bryan Adams concert which was for free and I was there, amazing memories were made at Hősök Tere where apparently, the King of Pop also wrote his own history. Pretty cool to think about it.

So much to share about Budapest and it's history of movies and video clips being shot there, let's dig into this topic a bit further in another part in the future. Thank you for reading and I hope to see you back next Monday with another blog and another topic.

Have a great week!

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