Odessa, with its historical buildings and streets of unique architecture, is an ideal film setting. It seems that the city was expressly created with the purpose to shoot films. There are hundreds of natural scenarios, traces of famous directors and many stories for scripts.
At the end of the 19th century, Odessa was famous for its 300 sunny days a year. And Soviet directors such as Eldar Ryazanov and Leonid Gaidai simply loved to run away from the cold autumn cities of Moscow and Leningrad to warm, always friendly Odessa, which became the Hollywood of Soviet Union.
Today, Odessa still amazes filmmakers, who started to use more and more the City's places as setting for their movies, like this following recent case.
"Transporter-3" (2008): Moldavanka district and other city sites.
Few people know that almost half of the film, with the british Jason Statham as starring character, was filmed on the streets of Odessa, in May 2008. A film crew of Luc Besson (about 40 people), headed by director Olivier Megaton, arrived in Odessa. The team stayed at the Black Sea Hotel and filmed in 28 locations throughout the city for a week.
In the plot, a criminal gang kidnaps the daughter of the Minister of Environmental Protection of Ukraine, to blackmail him into signing an official permit for the disposal of toxic waste in the country. Jason Statham saves her and brings her to Odessa to join her father.
The scene with the pursuit of Statham (on the port flyover) was also filmed in Odessa. The secret of these shots is that Statham himself never visited Odessa. The viewer does not realise that this is a montage of dynamic shots of Odessa streets, the back of an understudy and the face of the protagonist.
Strangely, Odessa played two roles: itself and the one of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. The directors of the film production decided that it would be more convenient to shoot all the scenes in Odessa. Shots about Budapest were taken in the Moldavanka, an historical district of Odessa.
