How one location represented five countries in a single film

Filmmakers have always wrestled with the gap between ambition and budget. When a script demands a journey across continents but the production can barely afford a return flight, the camera finds a clever shortcut. A single stretch of jungle, desert, or city block becomes a stand-in for half a dozen nations, with the help of costume changes, accent work, and a forgiving audience. This trick, sometimes called the "five flags on one street corner" approach, is practically a genre unto itself in action and exploitation pictures.

The economics are brutally simple. Moving a cast and crew across borders costs money that low-budget producers would rather spend on squibs, blood bags, or an extra day of pyrotechnics. Stand-ins solve the problem. A location with the right combination of vegetation, terrain, and permissive local authorities can double, triple, or quintuple as different countries. The audience, eager for thrills, rarely checks the passport stamps of every supporting extra.

For Mike and Iris of Badassesboobsandbodycounts.com, this kind of resourceful deception is exactly the kind of thing that makes exploitation cinema so endlessly fascinating. The show has spent nearly two hundred episodes pulling apart the seams of films that made the world out of whatever they had lying around. The official site gathers hundreds of productions that stitched together an entire geopolitical tour from a single forest clearing or coastal highway.

Australian genre fans have a particularly sharp appreciation for this practice. The country has been filmed to look like places it emphatically is not, and Australian filmmakers have shipped homegrown locations abroad in the imagination of Hollywood for decades. The local classification system, run by the Australian Classification Board, has also shaped how these films arrive, often with surprise cuts that change the rhythm of a chase or a fight.

The economics of cinematic disguise

Money drives the decision more than any artistic impulse. Flying a unit to five locations can eat a budget faster than a leading actor's per diem. Producers have learned to pick one spot that offers visual variety and let the script do the rest. A river can become a border. A dirt road can become a highway in another hemisphere. The cost savings can mean the difference between a finished film and a stack of unpaid invoices.

Permissive local authorities make the deal even sweeter. Countries with film-friendly bureaucracies, tax incentives, and few questions about on-screen violence attract productions looking to work fast and cheap. The Philippines, Thailand, and South Africa have built reputations as places where genre crews can shoot for weeks without permit headaches. The result is a global supply chain of stand-ins, with each country quietly exporting its look to represent somewhere else entirely.

The practice is so common that some locations now market themselves in those terms. Production guides in Manila and Cebu openly pitch the country's jungle and urban sprawl as ready-made for films set in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Indonesia. The same stretch of rainforest can play a Cambodian training camp in one scene and a Thai riverside village in the next, provided the production designer swaps a few prop signs.

The Philippine jungle as a pan-Asian backdrop

Few locations have been pressed into service as heavily as the Philippine countryside. The combination of lush jungle, accessible rivers, and cheap labour made it a favourite for American and Hong Kong producers throughout the eighties and nineties. Films set during the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge period, or contemporary conflicts across Southeast Asia were routinely lensed there. The result is a strange cinematic geography where the Philippines becomes a kind of pan-Asian everyman location, with the same hilltop clearing standing for a Cambodian border outpost in one production and a Burmese rebel camp in another.

The substitution works because most viewers cannot tell the difference between a nipa hut in Quezon and a longhouse in Borneo. The visual vocabulary of tropical Southeast Asia is similar enough across borders that the audience fills in the gaps. A few choice props and the right amount of mud do the rest. For exploitation filmmakers, the Philippines offered something even more valuable. The country had a deep bench of trained stunt performers and supporting actors who could convincingly play soldiers, rebels, and martial arts fighters in any Asian setting, while the same backdrop served as the fictional home of rebels, warlords, and drug lords in dozens of pictures.

Roger Corman productions used the country for films set in Vietnam, China, and generic fictional Asian kingdoms. Italian productions sent crews there for stories nominally set in Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Filipino action stars like Rudy Fernandez and Ronnie Ricketts found work playing characters with names from across the region, exporting Philippine jungles as the entire Asian continent.

When Australia pretended to be somewhere else entirely

Australia has long been a popular filming location precisely because of its geographic versatility. The red centre looks like Mars. The tropical north looks like Southeast Asia. The southern coastline can pass for temperate anywhere. Hollywood has leaned on Australian locations for decades to represent places that have little in common with Sydney or Melbourne, with the help of a few digital matte paintings or strategic costuming.

The classic case is the use of the Australian outback for American westerns and post-apocalyptic road movies. The terrain is alien enough that audiences accept it without question. At the same time, the country has been used to represent Pacific islands, African savannas, and even parts of Eastern Europe, helped by a generous film incentive scheme that has drawn international productions to studios in Sydney, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast hinterland. For Australian audiences, the trick is especially fun to spot. A thriller set in an American city that uses the Melbourne skyline feels like an inside joke, and a film set in an unspecified Asian country shot around Cairns gets a knowing chuckle from local viewers used to seeing the country dressed up in other nations' clothing.

Spain's greatest hits: standing in for Italy and beyond

Spain is perhaps the most overworked location in European genre cinema. The dry landscapes, varied architecture, and low costs made it irresistible to Italian producers from the sixties onward. Spaghetti westerns shot in Almería routinely represented the American Southwest, Mexico, and occasionally North Africa. The same desert plain became Texas in one film and a Saharan outpost in another. Sergio Leone's productions established the template, and generations of imitators followed.

Italian horror and giallo productions found Spain equally useful. The combination of crumbling villas, sun-blasted motorways, and medieval villages allowed producers to set stories in Italy, France, or anywhere in the Mediterranean with minimal adjustments. The Spanish stand-in was so common that some films now feel like unintentional travelogues of the Iberian peninsula rather than the countries named in the credits.

The Spanish locations also served as proxies for North Africa and the Middle East. Italian crews developed a shorthand where a whitewashed village meant Morocco, a stretch of rocky coast meant Greece, and a particular plaza meant Rome. Few viewers paused to check whether a Roman amphitheatre was actually the one in Mérida rather than the one in the Italian capital.

Studio lots as world maps

When outdoor locations fail, the backlot saves the day. Major studios have long maintained standing sets that can be redressed to represent different cities or countries. A single street in Culver City or Cinecittà can become London, Paris, or New York with the right signage, lampposts, and accent work. The technique reached its peak in the studio era, when Hollywood maintained literal collections of architectural salvage from around the world.

Cinecittà, the Italian studio complex outside the Italian capital, became famous as "Hollywood on the Tiber." Its standing collections of facades and piazzas allowed Italian productions to set films almost anywhere in Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. The studio dressed the same set as a Cairo market for one film and a Venetian piazza for the next, often within the same production schedule.

Modern equivalents include the standing sets at studios in Romania, Bulgaria, and South Africa. Australian studios have entered the market, with facilities around Melbourne and Brisbane offering standing sets that can be dressed to look like anywhere from a Manhattan brownstone to a London mews. Some productions build entire continents on a single stage, including the most ridiculous death trap ever built for a low budget action movie, where one warehouse stood in for a string of international settings.

The modern echo: streaming and the continued practice

The streaming era has not ended the practice of location substitution. If anything, it has intensified it. With production schedules tightened and budgets squeezed, streamers have leaned even harder on familiar stand-ins. A limited series set in five countries might be shot entirely in one of these workhorse locations, with the script adjusted to match the geography on offer. The practice has become so normalised that audiences rarely question it.

The same countries that have long served as stand-ins continue to dominate the practice. The Philippines remains a favourite for productions set across tropical Asia. Spain still represents Italy, Mexico, and points beyond. South Africa has emerged as a substitute for everything from contemporary cities to desert conflicts. Australia continues to supply locations for stories set in alien landscapes or other continents.

For genre fans, the fun is in the spotting. Few viewers watch an exploitation picture without wondering where the production actually lensed. The review archives are full of breakdowns that name the actual location behind the on-screen fiction. Australian genre enthusiasts, used to seeing the country dressed up as something else, often have the sharpest eye for the trick and trade screenshots of mismatched flora and suspiciously familiar skylines.

Locations that repeatedly double for other countries

• The Philippines, which stands in for Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia across action and horror productions.
• Australia, which represents Mars, Pacific islands, parts of Africa, and unspecified tropical zones.
• Spain, which doubles for Italy, Mexico, the American Southwest, and North Africa.
• Thailand, which substitutes for Cambodia, Myanmar, and generic tropical settings.
• South Africa, which has emerged as a stand-in for diverse urban and rural locations.

Countries frequently implied by a single shoot

• Vietnam, often filmed in the Philippines or Thailand when a production cannot access the real location.
• Italy, frequently represented by Spanish locations in European genre productions.
• Mexico, commonly shot in the American Southwest or Spanish desert landscapes.
• Cambodia, usually filmed in Thailand or the Philippines.
• Australia, occasionally represented by New Zealand or South African locations for productions that need a generic southern hemisphere feel.

Listeners can hear Mike and Iris dig into this kind of resourceful deception across nearly two hundred episodes. New instalments drop regularly, and the back catalogue rewards anyone with a taste for cinema that turned empty warehouses into the world. Subscribe through the usual podcast platforms, or jump straight into the archive for a tour of the most creative geographic fraud in genre history.