2 Guns|Le Pavillon Hotel, New Orleans — a 1907 lobby doing modern crime work

Walk west along Poydras from the river and the street becomes glass towers and parking decks. Then Le Pavillon turns up at Baronne: ten storeys of 1907 masonry with a carriage entrance, a portico, and a lobby nobody ever managed to talk out of its marble. It opened as the Hotel De Soto, and it has outlasted almost everything built around it.

2 Guns is a film about two men who never go home. Bobby is DEA and does not tell Stig. Stig is Naval Intelligence and does not tell Bobby. Everything they do happens in border motels, parked cars and hotel lobbies, and when the production needed a lobby with weight to it during its eight weeks in Louisiana, it came here. The fictional Camino Royale was assembled out of two New Orleans buildings — the penthouse from the casino at the foot of Canal Street, the ground-floor grandeur from Le Pavillon.

You can walk in. That is the useful thing about this location: it is a working hotel with a public lobby, not a set behind a fence. Nobody minds if you sit down. The chandeliers are enormous and slightly too much, the floor is polished stone, and there is usually a bellman moving luggage past the columns while somebody checks in behind you.

Stand near the Baronne Street doors and look back toward the desk. That is the geometry the camera liked — deep, symmetrical, expensive-looking, and entirely indifferent to whoever is walking through it with a bag they should not be carrying. (Locations per the film's official production notes. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.)