American Sniper|Leo Carrillo State Beach — Cold Water and the Long Way to BUD/S

Before Ramadi, before the scope, there is surf. The film's BUD/S training passage puts Kyle and a line of shivering candidates in the shallows with a log on their shoulders, and the Pacific does the rest. Those scenes were shot at Leo Carrillo State Beach, on the far western edge of Malibu where Los Angeles County runs out into Ventura.

The beach is named for Leo Carrillo, the character actor and Californian preservationist who sat on the State Beach and Parks Commission for eighteen years. It is not the smooth sand of the Santa Monica postcards. Leo Carrillo is reefs, sea caves, tide pools and a headland riddled with holes, which is why productions have used it for a century — you can point a camera in almost any direction and get a coast that does not read as suburban Los Angeles. The water here runs cold most of the year, colder than San Diego, which is exactly the texture the training sequence needed.

Park in the day-use lot off Pacific Coast Highway at the 35000 block, walk north past the lifeguard tower and keep going until the sand narrows against the rock. At low tide you can get through the tunnel in the headland to the northern cove.

Stand there in ankle-deep water for five minutes with the wind coming off the point. It stops being scenery quite fast. Photo: rock formations on the Malibu coast.