Late Fame filming locations: every street, bar and apartment behind Willem Dafoe's downtown New York

The film is so convincingly of downtown Manhattan that people have come out of it naming bars they think they recognise. A good number of those interiors are in New Jersey, and the director has said so out loud.

Late Fame follows Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a post office worker who published one poetry collection, Way Past Go, in the 1970s and then stopped. Fifty years on, a clutch of well-off young writers find the book and adopt him. Kent Jones directed from a screenplay by Samy Burch, adapting Arthur Schnitzler's posthumously published novella, with Martin Scorsese executive producing for Killer Films. Principal photography began on 22 January 2025.

SoHo is the real thing

The location that isn't faked is the neighbourhood itself. Jones moved Ed's past from the West Village to SoHo during development, partly because it matched when he and Dafoe both turned up in New York.

"It's largely the same visually... There's really no difference; you can't build high rises there," Jones told AwardsWatch in 2026, describing what survives of the SoHo he arrived in during the late 1970s.

He's more specific in New City, where he points at the physical fabric: the light coming off the buildings, the cobblestones, the storefronts, the raised loading platforms left over from the factories. Anthology Film Archives and the Wooster Group — named for Wooster Street — come up as the anchors of the version of the area the film is mourning.

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The bar is a fake, and so is everything else indoors

This is the part worth knowing before you go hunting for Ed's local.

"The bar itself, all the interiors for the film, were shot in New Jersey, and so that café is very much a Jersey place — but it feels like a New York place from 30 years ago or even more," Jones told RogerEbert.com in 2026.

So the pool games, the café where Ed's old friends hold court, the flats, the offices — Jersey, dressed to read as Lower Manhattan circa a few decades ago.

The Jersey side, location by location

• Hoboken, Bloomfield Street — multiple properties along one street were used, per Screen Global Production's February 2025 report from the shoot.
• Jersey City — Meyers' apartment is a working artist's building, where, as Jones described it, the owner lived at the back and let the ground floor as an Airbnb.
• The reading venue — the space for the big performance sequence isn't Brooklyn either. Jones's description: "almost like Bushwick, but not really; it's different, more surreal."
• SoHo exteriors — the streets, arcades and cobbles Ed walks, which is the only footage doing the geography honestly.

Where to see it

The film premiered at Venice on 30 August 2025 and went out in the US through Magnolia Pictures on 7 August 2026, including a run at Film Forum — which is, fittingly, about a fifteen-minute walk from the streets Ed wanders. It sits at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Greta Lee plays Gloria, having replaced Sandra Hüller in October 2024 over a scheduling clash, with Edmund Donovan as Meyers plus Jake Lacy, Tony Torn and Clark Johnson.

For the record: Jones has said he deliberately avoided pretty camerawork on the SoHo material and shot it closer to documentary, on the grounds that the buildings were already doing the job.

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