Where was Two Tickets to Greece filmed? The Cyclades islands behind the trip — one of them already famous from The Big Blue
The island two estranged friends dream about in Marc Fitoussi's comedy has been trading on a 1988 French film for decades. The shoot itself covered four Cycladic islands before finishing in the Paris suburbs.
The island the characters spend thirty years dreaming about is real, and it has been living off a Luc Besson film since 1988. The production turned up to find the joke already made for them.
Two Tickets to Greece — Les Cyclades in French, written and directed by Marc Fitoussi — opened in France on 11 January 2023. Laure Calamy plays Magalie, Olivia Côte plays Blandine, and Kristin Scott Thomas turns up as Bijou. The Greek shoot ran from 10 September to 27 October 2021; the Paris-region material was picked up between 9 and 26 November. Amorgos is the destination in the script and the main location on the ground, but it wasn't the only one.
Amorgos, and what The Big Blue did to it
Besson's Le Grand Bleu shot its Greek sequences on Amorgos in 1987: Chora, the island capital; Agia Anna, the rocky beach below it; the Panagia Hozoviotissa monastery clinging to the cliff northeast of Chora; and Liveros Bay, where the wreck of the Olympia sits and the diving rescue was filmed. Nearly four decades later the island has not moved on, which is exactly what Fitoussi discovered when he visited.
"The tavernas play images from it on a big screen, the music is in every hotel, right down to the harbour café renamed after the film," Fitoussi said in AlloCiné's production notes.
He put it in the script. Blandine's pilgrimage to Chozoviotissa and the shop flogging Big Blue souvenirs are both in the finished film.
Every location used
- Amorgos — the principal island, including the Chozoviotissa monastery and the Kerinos stretch.
- Mykonos — shot before the unit moved on to Naxos.
- Naxos — 15 to 26 October 2021, covering Chora, Apollonas, Abram and Pyrgaki.
- Santorini — a small amount of material, per Greek trade coverage of the premiere.
- Paris region — the 2019 mainland scenes, November 2021.
The parts that went wrong
Island-hopping by ferry with a full crew turned out to be the hardest element of the production, with departure times as late as 11pm dictating the schedule. Wind was worse. The Kerinos section defeated the sound department repeatedly, including the sequence of the two women hauling luggage along a road, which had to fight the Aegean the whole way. Fitoussi picked the region precisely because he didn't know it.
"I've always liked choosing places that were unknown to me," he said of his location habits, which by then had already taken him through several countries across eight features.
Can you go and stand in it?
All of it is accessible. Chozoviotissa is an active 11th-century monastery reached by a stone staircase up the cliff face; Agia Anna is a short walk below Chora; the Olympia wreck at Liveros is visible from the shore at Kalotaritissa and is one of the island's standard boat-trip stops. The souvenir shop in the film is not a set dressing gag.
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For the record: the childhood scenes that open The Big Blue weren't filmed on Amorgos at all. Besson shot those at Manganari on Ios. Amorgos got the monastery, the cliffs and the tourism.