Matt Damon as Odysseus in Messinia, Lily Collins in Mykonos for “Emily in Paris,” Brad Pitt on Hydra for the filming of “The Riders”: in recent months, major international productions have once again turned Greece into an open-air movie set. Yet the relationship between Greece and the screen stretches back decades. Audiences have watched “Lara Croft” (Angelina Jolie) roam Milos and Santorini, seen John le Carré’s “The Little Drummer Girl” come to life at the Acropolis, and followed the adventures of “The Durrells in Corfu.”
Further back, films such as “Shirley Valentine” (1989; shot in Mykonos), “Summer Lovers” (1982; shot in Crete and Santorini), and “The Guns of Navarone” (1961; shot on Rhodes) helped introduce Greek destinations to international audiences. In some cases, however, Greece was more than a backdrop. The locations themselves became stars. The films went on to inspire generations of travelers eager to experience for themselves Sophia Loren’s Hydra, Melina Mercouri’s Piraeus, Anthony Quinn’s Crete, Luc Besson’s Amorgos, Roger Moore’s Corfu, Penélope Cruz’s Kefalonia, Meryl Streep’s Skopelos, and Ethan Hawke’s Messinia.
‘Boy on a Dolphin’ (1957)
In the summer of 1955, the Greek public learned for the first time that Hollywood giant 20th Century Fox was planning to film ‘Boy on a Dolphin’ on the island of Hydra. According to producer Samuel G. Engel, the film would introduce Greece to American audiences. As archaeologist Dimitris Plantzos notes in “Hollywood, Greek Antiquities and the Kindness of Strangers,” published in the collective volume “The 20th Century of Greek Cinema,” the film contained “most of the characteristic elements that were used to redefine Greece’s image for the global tourism market during the 1960s and 1970s, as an exotic landscape of eternal summer.”
