Movies Filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana: Cinematic Identity, Interview with the Vampire, 12 Years a Slave, Easy Rider, and Hollywood South on Screen
New Orleans does not merely serve as a filming location. It possesses. Every production that sets up cameras in the French Quarter, the Garden District, or the cypress-draped bayous surrounding the city comes away with footage that carries the weight of three centuries of layered history, from Spanish Colonial architecture to Creole culture to the above-ground cemeteries that look like no other place in America. The movies filmed in New Orleans span from the silent era, when Tarzan of the Apes was produced in Louisiana in 1918, to the present day, when the state consistently ranks among the top production destinations in the country. Louisiana was dubbed the “movie capital of the world” by CBS News in 2014, and New Orleans was the primary reason. The city’s combination of Gothic architecture, subtropical atmosphere, multicultural character, and generous state tax incentives has attracted close to 500 major productions over the past century.
For filmmakers working in the Gulf South or professionals providing New Orleans videographer services on commercial and narrative projects, the Crescent City’s screen history is not background information. It is the reason productions keep coming back.
A Streetcar Named Desire and the French Quarter Mythology
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, established the French Quarter as one of cinema’s most potent settings. Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, standing in a ripped undershirt in the humid New Orleans night and screaming “Stella!” up to his wife’s balcony, created an image of the city that has persisted for over seven decades. The Pontalba Apartments in Jackson Square provided the setting for the Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest that takes place annually at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, where dozens of participants compete to deliver the most convincing howl. The film was based on Williams’ 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and its New Orleans locations—the cramped apartments, the clanging streetcars, and the oppressive humidity that seems to radiate from the screen—became the template for how American cinema portrays desire, decay, and the collision of old-money gentility with working-class brutality.
Interview with the Vampire: New Orleans Gothic
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, used New Orleans and the surrounding plantation country as the primary setting for its tale of immortal bloodlust. Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie served as Louis’ homeplace, the sprawling manor that Lestat’s reluctant companion sets ablaze in one of the film’s most visually stunning sequences. The restored antebellum Greek Revival mansion, with its iconic double row of 28 oak trees, provided a location that embodied both the beauty and the horror of the vampire’s existence.
The French Quarter’s narrow streets and the graveyard scenes, filmed at Fort Macomb and at locations in Eunice and Norco, gave the production the authentic Gothic atmosphere that has made New Orleans the unofficial American capital of the vampire genre. Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, in the Garden District, has appeared in so many films and television productions, including The Originals and Double Jeopardy, that it functions almost as a permanent set. Among movies filmed in New Orleans, Interview with the Vampire cemented the city’s identity as the place where the supernatural feels plausible.
12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, and Louisiana’s Plantation Cinema
12 Years a Slave (2013), Steve McQueen’s searing adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, was filmed extensively in Louisiana, with New Orleans serving as a key production base. Audubon Park, the Columns Hotel, and the French Quarter all appear in the film. Felicity Plantation provided the setting for the most harrowing sequences. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Lupita Nyong’o, and it demonstrated that Louisiana’s plantation locations, with their complex and painful histories, could serve as settings for productions of the highest artistic and moral seriousness. Django Unchained (2012), Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist western, used Evergreen Plantation in Edgard and the Second Line Stages studio in New Orleans. Green Book (2018), the Oscar-winning drama about an unlikely friendship between a Black pianist and his Italian-American driver, was filmed almost entirely in Louisiana despite depicting a cross-country road trip, with the International House Hotel, The Roosevelt Hotel, Clover Grill, the Orpheum, and the Saenger Theatre all serving as backdrops.
Easy Rider, Benjamin Button, and the City as Character
Easy Rider (1969), the counterculture landmark starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, brought its protagonists to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, where they wandered through the French Quarter and ended up in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Hopper’s acid-fueled scene in the cemetery prompted the Archdiocese of New Orleans to ban subsequent non-documentary filming in the graveyard, a restriction that shaped production planning in the city for decades.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), starring Brad Pitt as a man who ages in reverse, used the Nolan House at 2707 Coliseum Street in the Garden District as the central location for the film’s New Orleans sequences. The house, a spectacular mansion that practically functions as a character in the story, anchored the film’s exploration of time, memory, and mortality in the lush, decaying beauty of the Garden District. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Werner Herzog, was originally meant to be set in New York but was relocated to New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina, using the city’s post-storm landscape as an integral part of its crime narrative.
American Horror Story, The Originals, and Television’s New Orleans
Television has embraced New Orleans with particular enthusiasm. FX’s American Horror Story: Coven (2013–2014) filmed its third season in the city, using the Buckner Mansion, the LaLaurie Mansion, the Hermann-Grima House, and Atchafalaya Restaurant as key locations. The Originals (2013–2018), the vampire drama spinoff of The Vampire Diaries, was set entirely in the French Quarter, using St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, Lafayette Cemetery, and Napoleon House as recurring locations. HBO’s Treme (2010–2013), named for one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the nation, used real New Orleans music venues, including Vaughan’s, Snug Harbor, The Spotted Cat, and Tipitina’s, to tell the story of the city’s recovery after Hurricane Katrina. True Detective Season 1 (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, filmed extensively across south Louisiana, using Fort Macomb, Oak Alley Plantation, and the Cajun town of Eunice as primary locations.
Hollywood South on Screen
The catalog of movies filmed in New Orleans reads like a history of American cinema itself, from Brando screaming in the French Quarter to Brad Pitt aging backward in the Garden District, from Peter Fonda dropping acid in a cemetery to Lupita Nyong’o delivering an Oscar-winning performance on a Louisiana plantation. Louisiana’s state tax incentives, which have made it one of the most competitive production destinations in the country, have accelerated the volume, but the city’s appeal predates any incentive program. New Orleans is a place that looks like no other American city, sounds like no other American city, and feels like no other American city, and that irreducible specificity is the quality filmmakers return for again and again. For New Orleans videographer professionals and production companies, Hollywood South is not a nickname. It is a description of reality, and the industry shows no sign of slowing down.
