Last year, Stacy Perskie and his team knocked on every single door in the downtown core of Mexico City – big retailers, souvenir shops, shoeshine stands – to ask, politely, if they wouldn’t mind closing for 10 days. “Some people were cool. Others less so.” And everyone, of course, wanted money.  Such is the nature of taking over an entire city centre to make a James Bond film: in this case, Spectre in Mexico City. With its glitzy art nouveau buildings and hardscrabble urban neighbourhoods, the city has long been a classic shooting location, not just for homegrown hits like Amores Perros and Y tu Mamá También, but the 1989 Bond film Licence to Kill – on which Perskie’s mother was a production manager herself – and a host of Hollywood productions. He showed us around some of his favourite filming locations.  “Isthmus City” is the name of the fictional metropolis in Timothy Dalton’s second and final outing as 007 – and El Presidente, the hotel in which Bond exercises his licence alongside Carey Lowell’s Pam Bouvier, is the splendid, Tiffany-ceilinged, art nouveau Gran Hotel de la Ciudad de Mexico. It was built in 1899, just off the Zócalo, as a shopping mall – one of the few beautiful historic buildings to have started life as retail instead of ending up that way. You can still see the CM (Centro Mercantil) lettering on the ceiling, and ride the same elevator 007 does in this scene:  In a clever wink, the Gran Hotel also pops up in Spectre – apparently the only time a building has appeared in two different Bond movies.  The dastardly villain Sanchez’s Banco de Isthmus, in which Bond makes a deposit, is in fact Mexico City’s main correos – a jaw-dropping marble and gold vault that still functions as a working post office. It’s on Calle Tacuba just across from the Palacio de Bellas Artes and visiting it is the most Bond-like you’re ever going to feel mailing a postcard.  The crucial car crash in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s breakthrough film takes place in front of the Super Carniceria butcher shop in Condesa. The neighbourhood was devastated following the 1985 earthquake as residents fled for the suburbs and crime skyrocketed. Today the butcher shop is gone, but a plaque commemorates the spot – and serves as a marker of a time before Condesa’s current reinvention as a swish hangout.  Man on Fire was originally intended to be set in Italy, but Mexico City’s reputation for kidnappings worked, for once, in its favour. Tony Scott’s feature about a jaded CIA operative who unleashes Denzel Washingtony steely stares after his nine-year-old charge is abducted is mainly notable for some nice location work – particularly a scene in which Mickey Rourke pits his seediness against Marc Anthony’s smarm over lunch in the Casa de los Azulejos, an 18th-century palace that is now the flagship restaurant of the Sanborns department store chain. The murals are by Orozco, although the building’s most striking feature is its exterior, which is covered in typically Mexican Puebla tiling.  The poverty-squeezed, overcrowded, essentially unplanned and underserviced neighbourhoods that spill up and over the mountains had the somewhat unfortunate opportunity to feature as a dystopian vision of Earth gone to hell in Elysium (2013). Some of the firefights were also shot in a massive rubbish dump.  Director Neill Blomkamp wanted his film to address the widening inequality gap, not just within cities but between nations, that he witnessed while growing up in South Africa. “Johannesburg forces you to see both [rich and poor] all the time,” he told the Guardian at the time of the film’s release. “I think there’s a bunch of cities like that, from Rio to Joburg to Mumbai” ... to Mexico City.  Antonio Banderas is a gentleman in want of a wife in Original Sin, whose production crew was in want of a location for a psychedelic freakout featuring a naked woman riding a horse in 19th-century Havana. Mexico City’s Spanish Casino, on Isabela Catolica street, did the trick. You can see the building – and the horse – in the video clip above at 49:13 (it automatically starts there), as well as 51:18, 54:23 and 1:06:54. It also stars as the Isthmus Casino in Licence to Kill.  The pesky Mexican Revolution temporarily interrupted construction on the city’s temple to the performing arts. The strange result: a neoclassical exterior with an art deco interior. Both are impressive in their own right. But it is the murals by, among others, Diego “Frida Kahlo’s husband” Rivera that give the place its truly spectacular, surreal quality. Perskie got permission to shoot inside the building – an incredible rarity – for the upcoming Gael García Bernal television series Mozart in the Jungle.  What locations did we miss? Tweet us using #guardianmexico – and if you’re able to include a live photograph as well, we’ll embed it in the Guardian Mexico City liveblog
From the recent Bond outing that closed the downtown core for 10 days, to starring roles in Elysium (as a dystopian ‘Earth’) and Original Sin (as a nostalgic ‘Cuba’), the Mexican capital is a film star in its own right