American Sniper|O'Malley's on Main — The Bar Where He Met Taya

She is drinking alone and she is not impressed. Taya tells him Navy SEALs are arrogant, self-centered and think they can lie about everything, and then she throws up in the parking lot, and that is how the marriage starts. The scene is set in San Diego. It was filmed at O'Malley's on Main in Seal Beach, a small Orange County beach town thirty miles up the coast.

O'Malley's sits at 140 Main Street, three doors up from the ocean end of a two-block commercial strip that has stubbornly refused to modernise. Dark wood, a long bar, Guinness on tap, televisions showing whatever game is on. It has been a Main Street fixture for decades and it is a working neighbourhood pub, not a set — which is exactly why Eastwood's crew wanted it. The production needed a room that already looked lived in, and a street it could close without shutting down a city.

Go on a weekday afternoon. Order at the bar rather than a table, sit where the light comes in off Main, and notice how short the room is; on screen it reads as a much bigger place. The illusion is entirely in the lens.

Then walk out the front door and turn left. The Pacific is two hundred metres away, and the pier where the next scene was shot is right in front of you. Photo: representative classic Irish pub frontage.