The 355|Pont Louis-Philippe — Three Iron Arches and a Drive Nobody Should Have

The chase reaches the river, and the river does what rivers do to a chase: it forces a choice. In The 355, Nick Fowler runs the stolen drive across Paris, and the camera puts him on the Pont Louis-Philippe — three low iron arches carrying the Right Bank quay over to the Île Saint-Louis. Simon Kinberg's crew shot the opening pursuit at real Paris addresses rather than on a backlot, and this bridge is the piece that gives the whole sequence its geography. You always know exactly where everyone is, which is rarer in a modern spy film than it should be.

The bridge is small, and that is the point. The current span went up in 1862 to replace an earlier suspension crossing, it runs barely a hundred metres, and it drops you onto the quiet upstream end of the island where the crowds thin out within thirty seconds. Stand in the middle and look west: the flank of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais rises behind the quay, and the Pont d'Arcole and the towers of Notre-Dame stack up beyond it. Look down and you find the reason the shot works — the parapet sits low, so a running figure never disappears behind stonework.

Come at first light. The sun arrives down the river from behind Notre-Dame and turns the water roughly the colour of the bridge's paint, and for about twenty minutes the crossing belongs to people walking to work rather than to anyone taking pictures.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.