The Adjustment Bureau | Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1 — the podium with a skyline behind it

The campaign scenes needed a stage where a young congressman could look like the future, so the production set David Norris's election speech on the Brooklyn waterfront, with the East River and the whole of Lower Manhattan stacked up behind his head. It is a politician's dream backdrop and the film knows it: the skyline does the arguing while Matt Damon works the crowd.

Pier 1 is the northern end of Brooklyn Bridge Park, built on the deck of an old cargo pier and opened to the public in 2010, the year the crew was working here. Its best feature is the Granite Prospect — wide steps cut from salvaged granite from the Willis Avenue Bridge, dropping toward the water like seating for a theatre whose stage is New York. People eat lunch on them. Couples wait there for sunset.

Go late in the afternoon and sit on the third or fourth step up. The ferries cross, the bridge traffic hums overhead, and you understand the joke the film is making: a man can stand in front of that view and say almost anything, and it will sound like destiny.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.