Small-town film location tours: villages on screen

Small places often do the heavy lifting on screen. Mdina, the walled old capital of Malta, has fewer than three hundred residents and played King's Landing in the first season of Game of Thrones. Ballintoy, a harbor of a few houses on the Antrim coast, became the Iron Islands. Stykkishólmur, a fishing town on the Snaefellsnes peninsula in Iceland, stood in for a town in Greenland in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013). And on the road from Dubrovnik to Split our Game of Thrones tour stops for lunch in Ston, a village behind medieval walls that climb the hill above its salt pans.

In New Zealand the whole theme is a short drive from the cities: the farm near Matamata that became Hobbiton, the village of Glenorchy at the head of Lake Wakatipu, the old gold town of Arrowtown near Queenstown. Around Salzburg, the lake villages of St. Gilgen and Mondsee, where the von Trapp wedding was filmed in the basilica, are part of our Sound of Music day.

These are gentle days. You walk a main street and a harbor, have coffee where the crew had theirs, and drive on. Small towns also mean small hotels, sometimes a family guesthouse, and one or two nights in each place. Our leaders know the people who run the cafes and the museums, and that is half the value of going with someone local.

People live in these places all year, long after the crews have gone. We visit at quiet hours, keep the group together and leave the houses alone.

Small places also keep the best local stories. The people who rented out their pub to a film crew, cooked for the actors or appeared as extras are often still there, and our leaders know who is happy to talk about it. We never turn up uninvited, and we always buy lunch.