Where Was ‘The Killer’ Filmed? How David Fincher Found Those Gorgeous Filming Locations

Attention all cinephiles: The Killer, the latest movie from director David Fincher, is now streaming on Netflix. Time to cancel those Friday night plans—you’re staying in tonight and getting cozy with Michael Fassbender.

Based on the French graphic novel series of the same name, with a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker (who also penned Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en) The Killer stars Fassbender as a trained assassin who, despite all his big talk about being in complete control, makes a big mistake on a job. The rest of the movie is spent on Fassbender dealing with the fallout of his screw-up. There’s a lot of guns, a lot of fighting, a lot of running, and, yes, a lot of killing. He is the titular killer, after all.

Also starring Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton, The Killer might not be Fincher’s best ever, but it can’t be denied that the film is visually beautiful. That’s thanks in large part to the fact that Fincher filmed on location all over the world. Read on to learn more about The Killer filming locations.

Where was The Killer filmed?

The Killer was filmed mainly in France, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, and Chicago.

The Paris square you see in first portion of the movie, when Michael Fassbender is stalking his target, was filmed on location in Paris, France. The production team scouted out the Parisian square that Fassbender spends so much time gazing out from his window in the summer of 2021, while pandemic restrictions were still in place. The Paris filming was further complicated by the many (fake) weapons on set while filming in the square. In an interview for The Killer press notes, Fincher remarked, “The French government wants to know where you’re going with that sniper rifle with a foot-long silencer on it. Even if it’s a fake one.”

However, the WeWork apartment where Fassbender spends his days was actually filmed in New Orleans. The production transformed an old mill into Fassbender’s “Crow’s Nest.”

In the same press notes interview, production designer Don Burt explained, “We shot exteriors and then built the interiors of the apartment he was firing into. And they were composited into existing buildings. The buildings were in the style of mid-19th century Haussmann Parisian architecture. We took those and built our own version, to have the control we needed for all the work that had to be done.”

It was Fincher’s idea to make the space a WeWork building that was under construction—so, no, you can’t rent out the WeWork from The Killer, because it doesn’t actually exist.

The sequence when Fassbender flees to his home in the Dominican Republic, only to discover his secret girlfriend has been attacked, was filmed on location in the DR. That said, it wasn’t quite as hot, wet, and humid as it looks in the movie—a diffusion filter was utilized in post-production for the DR scenes, in order to give those scenes a vibrant shimmer.

The sequences in Florida were actually shot in New Orleans. The house where Fassbender fights “the brute”—one of the assassins who attacked his girlfriend—was built by the production, inspired by the location where they found to film. According to production designer Don Brute, “It was originally written that Brute lived on a less-traveled street, where the houses seemed humbler, but when we shot it felt like the kind of place somebody with a lot of hidden money might buy.”

As for the final sequence in upstate New York: That was actually filmed in the area around Chicago and St. Charles, Illinois. So that’s a lot of different places for one movie! And, as Burt said in the same interview, that presented challenges for creating a coherent aesthetic for the film. “There was the challenge of the different locales. In the Dominican Republic you were dealing with a different language and a different texture: it was lusher, it was greener, it was more colorful. That versus the sort of grayness of Paris. And then there was the big city feel of Chicago.”