Air Force One | Red Square — The Only Frame Actually Shot in Moscow

Almost none of this film was made in Russia. The palace is Cleveland, the prison is Mansfield, the state dinner is Hancock Park. But a second unit did go to Moscow, and the establishing plates they brought back — the cobbles, the Kremlin wall, the onion domes of St Basil's at the southern end — are what let an audience accept everything that follows.

Red Square earned its name before it earned its politics: krasnaya meant beautiful in Old Russian before it settled into meaning red. It has been a market, an execution ground, a parade route for missile transporters, and, in 1996, a place where a film crew from Los Angeles could stand with a long lens for a few hours and leave with a country in a can. The square runs roughly 330 metres by 70, which is smaller than the newsreels suggest and larger than any photograph makes it feel.

Walk in from Nikolskaya Street rather than the river, the way the plates were framed. The cobbles are set on end, uneven under the sole, and the sound your own footsteps make there is the one thing no establishing shot has ever captured.