Fanspot
The Cloisters
It’s as if I’ve always fallen from the highest building in the world. The second I saw you, I stopped falling.
Tony (Ansel Elgort)
Intimately linked to New York, the story of West Side Story incited Steven Spielberg from the start to consider a local shooting. While he exploits locations in New Jersey, Newark in particular, he is as keen as possible, like Robert Wise before him, to film the Big Apple, a character in its own right. As with the first adaptation of the legendary Broadway musical, set in the Upper West Side in the 1950s, the filmmaker and his team set out to find the most suitable locations.
Tony’s (Ansel Elgort) declaration of love to Maria (Rachel Zegler), a very important moment in the film, is shot at The Cloisters. The old stones of this neo-romano-gothic abbey building bring West Side Story a little closer to its model Romeo and Juliet. Far from the overcrowded arteries of Manhattan and the conflicts between the Skarks and the Jets, Steven Spielberg can organize the evocation of strong feelings between the two main characters of his film, within an exceptional and atypical setting. The sequence takes place in the Cloister of Bonnefont, one of the greenest courtyards of the museum.
Steven Spieberg also commissioned the construction of sets at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn in order to film scenes that are complicated to shoot in natural settings. His film ends up being a magnificent mix of shots in a transformed New York City, in authentic locations such as The Cloisters, and in great, larger-than-life settings.
The filming of West Side Story lasted 100 days.
The Met Cloisters
Administered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Cloisters is an American museum with a collection of medieval objects.
Surrounded by gardens, this timeless place brings together five European medieval cloisters. Designed by the architect Charles Collens, it was inaugurated on May 10, 1938. The cloisters in question are exact replicas of four French sites, namely the Abbey of Saint-Michel de Cuxa in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in Languedoc, the Abbey of Bonnefont-en-Comminges and the Abbey of Trie-sur-Baïse in Bigorre, and one Spanish site, the apse of the chapel of Fuentidueña. The objects collected tell the story of the medieval period. It is possible to admire tapestries from Flanders, a Romanesque cross acquired under Thomas Hoving, illuminated manuscripts, statues and stained glass. In 1996, Al Pacino shot sequences from his film Looking for Richard. Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel also stopped here for the 1968 production of A Sheriff in New York. It hosts one of the key scenes in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.
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Fanspots Stories New York
Discover the secrets of the cult places of the greatest masterpieces of pop culture in New York!
The world capital of pop culture, New York embodies unbridled creative freedom. The city that never sleeps has been the muse of a large number of directors, actors, screenwriters, singers, musicians, cartoonists and writers…
Many have passed on their fascination for the city to the general public and made some of its places famous worldwide, making them into the legend of pop culture. These are the secrets of a hundred of them revealed in this first volume of the Fanspots Stories collection.
Did you know that?
Did you know that the filming of Rage Against The Machine’s Music Now in the Fire caused Wall Street to shut down for the first time since 1929?
Fanspots Stories New York is also
Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, Superman, Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin…
Directed by a team of pop culture specialists and embellished with many anecdotes, Fanspots Stories New York tells more than just a story: these are some of the most fascinating stories in pop culture.
Fanspot Stories New York
100 pop cults
a unique and new concept
224 pages of fun
a beautiful large-format book 24 x 30, round back slicefil
Content quality
Interest for fans
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Discover all the places West Side Story on our map
By Gilles Rolland
Passionné de cinéma, de rock and roll, de séries TV et de littérature. Rédacteur de presse et auteur des livres Le Heavy Metal au cinéma, Paroles de fans Guns N' Roses, Paroles de fans Rammstein et Welcome to my Jungle : 100 albums rock et autres anecdotes dépareillées. Adore également voyager à la recherche des lieux les plus emblématiques de la pop culture.