Where did you film in New York City?
It gets harder and harder to do a period piece in New York City, so we scouted everywhere from Harlem to the Lower East Side. We ended up in Chinatown on Madison Street, which is just below the Manhattan Bridge, for Tom’s apartment. We used Mechanics Alley, which Tom walks through after he gets off the subway and feels he’s being followed. The antique store was in the West Village. It’s an empty space. The shipyard [where Dickie’s father works] was at the [Brooklyn] Navy Yard in an old warehouse space.
What locations did you use in Atrani?
The piazza [Piazzetta Umberto]. The exterior of Marge’s house. The beautiful beach. One of my favorite locations is the little post office, which was really a garage with strange proportions that just felt so right to me. I love the fact that it’s sitting in a little tunnel that runs through the town square. We also didn’t think we were going to put the bus stop [where Tom gets off] in Atrani. If you know the Amalfi coast at all, there’s one two-lane road that runs through all of it, so being able to control traffic for the few scenes we had was not easy. But you get this fantastic view when Tom’s on the road looking back down into the square.
Where was your version of the real-life Hotel Miramare?
The exterior was an entrance to a convent in Atrani and the interior was a private home we stripped out and made into the hotel. It had that beautiful room on the corner, where Tom stays, and it looks out to the sea and to Dickie’s house.
Was Dickie’s house an actual villa?
It was actually a villa in Capri, Villa Torricella. We looked at a lot of possible villas and palazzi. We had seen something in Ischia, where [The Talented Mr. Ripley] film was shot. But Steve had been in Capri for the film festival a number of times and noticed this villa and was so taken with it. There are three different factions of a family that live in the house, so the parts of the villa were broken up. We had to negotiate with all the different families to get permission to use the different parts of the house to put together Dickie’s house.
