3 Days to Kill|Place de la Concorde — eight lanes of traffic and nowhere left to run

Every Paris thriller eventually arrives at Concorde, because it is the only square in the city large enough to make a man look small. Eight hectares of open granite between the Tuileries and the Champs-Élysées, a 3,300-year-old obelisk from Luxor in the middle, two fountains copied from Saint Peter's, and traffic that circulates with no lane markings and no apparent rules. The film runs its Paris pursuit through here, and the location does the work: there is no cover on Concorde. None. That is the design.

It was laid out in the 1750s as a royal square and became, in 1793, the place where the guillotine stood — Louis XVI died roughly where the western fountain now runs, Marie Antoinette a few months later near the same spot. The renaming to Concorde was an attempt to talk the square out of its own memory. The obelisk arrived in 1836 partly because a monument with no political affiliation was the only thing anyone could agree to put there.

Cross it on foot at least once, using the pedestrian crossings from the Tuileries gates toward the Hôtel de Crillon, and look back along the axis: obelisk, Champs-Élysées, Arc de Triomphe, and on a clear evening the Grande Arche at La Défense behind it. Night is better. The lamps around the fountains are the ones the camera used.

Standing in the middle of all that space, with cars circling and nothing to put your back against, you understand why the sequence was shot here rather than in an alley. The square exposes people. It always has.

Location photo: free-licence stock photography of Place de la Concorde (Pexels).