🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
Years ago, director Tom Harper was traveling to Lisbon when he thought: “God, this would be a great place to shoot a car chase.”
That dream has now come to life in his new film Heart of Stone, which sends its protagonist Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) on a breakneck sequence through the European capital’s winding, medieval streets. “I was really struck — not only by the beauty of it, but by its textures,” Harper told Netflix earlier this year. “It’s got layers and layers of different textures: tiles and white cobblestones that reflect the light. It’s also set on seven hills.”
Portugal is only one of the movie’s many far-flung locations. As a member of the Charter, a secret organization of elite spies who protect humanity using a one-of-a-kind AI known as the Heart, Stone and her colleagues have no national allegiances or political leanings. Instead, they travel all over the world to ensure peace on Earth. That is, until hacker Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt) threatens that hard-won stability, which causes Stone to take the audience on a global adventure as she fights to save the Heart from those who might use it for nefarious ends.
Ahead, take a trip through Heart of Stone’s most dazzling, eye-candy filming locations, from the Italian Alps to the Sahara. Drop those packing tips, Rachel Stone!
Heart of Stone opens with its protagonists mingling in rarefied air — literally. The dizzying sequence that begins in a glamorous casino and ends with Gadot’s special agent parachuting off a 3,000-foot cliff after a high-speed ski chase was filmed at the Glacier Hotel Grawand in Senales, Italy. Perched at a staggering altitude of 10,538 feet, it’s the highest elevation hotel in all of Europe — the only one in the Alps that looks down at the mountains rather than up. Extreme sports stunt coordinator J.T. Holmes helped construct the speed riding sequence there.
“We had huge challenges,” Harper said. “It was freezing cold. We were working at high altitude. But we were fortunate enough to be able to work with some of the best speed flyers in the world — that’s when you ski down a mountain with a parachute, and it was lit up with an LED. I don’t think we’ve seen that in film before.”
Next stop: Lisbon, where Stone, Parker (Jamie Dornan), and their MI6 team are tracking Bhatt’s mysterious hacker. The Portuguese capital’s hilly landscape and ancient winding cobblestone roads provided a built-in set for Heart of Stone’s second breakneck chase sequence. “[We] got amazing access,” Harper said, adding, “I never thought that we’d be able to speed cars through the central square, throw cars off steps, and crash into things. But they were wonderfully accommodating. It’s a heritage city as well, so you have to really make sure that you are not damaging anything. I mean, we did damage things. We damaged cars and we broke a lot of cameras. But we left Lisbon in one piece.”
The climactic scene at the server farm in Reykjavík features the explosion of Harpa, a concert hall and one of the Icelandic capital’s most recognizable landmarks. SFX supervisor Paul Corbould and his team rigged a flawless explosion with stunt people and vans flying, as well as hundreds of extras fleeing for their lives. Fear not, no one was hurt and not one piece of glass at Harpa was damaged — an impressive feat with a building composed almost entirely of glass.
Another iconic Reykjavík landmark featured in the film is the Hallgrímskirkja Church, the tallest structure in the country. Motorcycle stuntman Dan Wyle jumped the 6-foot wall surrounding the church.
Harper returned to the Royal Albert Hall to film the pivotal meeting of the Four Kings — he recently directed the short film Your Room Will Be Ready (narrated by Mick Jagger) to celebrate the concert hall’s 150-year anniversary. The orchestra seen rehearsing in the background in Heart of Stone is the one and only Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, practicing a piece specifically written for the film by composer Steven Price titled “Heart of London.”
The film’s desert scenes were shot in the Sahara in Erfoud, Morocco — an area that so closely resembles the geology of the planet Mars that various space agencies have staged simulated missions there.
For the sequence of the aerial assault on the Locker, the Charter’s supercool airship that floats around the Earth at 80,000 feet to keep the Heart safe, stunt coordinator Holmes and and his wingsuit jump team worked in tandem with world-famous aerial coordinator and helicopter pilot Kevin LaRosa II. (LaRosa also worked on Top Gun: Maverick.) Unlike the other exotic locations in the movie, you’ll need more than a passport to visit this one. In fact, the only way to visit it is to watch Heart of Stone.
