50/50|Victory Square, Hastings at Cambie — the crosswalk where a Needle was pasted in

To sell Vancouver as Seattle, the production needed streets that would hold a skyline that was not there. Victory Square gave them one. The wedge of park where Hastings, Cambie and Hamilton converge opens a long sightline west, and in the finished film that sightline carries a Space Needle dropped in above the rooftops while Adam crosses with the light.

The square is small and heavy with history. The cenotaph at its centre was unveiled in 1924 on ground that had held the city's first courthouse, and the surrounding blocks are early Vancouver in stone: the 1912 Dominion Building with its mansard roof, the old Province newspaper offices, the Flack Block. This is also the seam where downtown meets the Downtown Eastside, and the square has spent a century as a place for remembrance ceremonies, protests and people with nowhere else to sit.

The film uses it for thirty seconds of a man walking. That is often how set-jetting works: the location carries far more than the shot asks of it.

Cross at the same light and the composite falls apart in your hands. The rooftops are the right height, the grey is the right grey, the streetcar-era brick is convincing — and the horizon holds the Coast Mountains instead of a tower on legs.

Location photo: Victory Square cenotaph, Vancouver (Wikimedia Commons).