I Am Legend (2007) is an American post-apocalyptic science-fiction horror film directed by Francis Lawrence, based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel. Will Smith stars as Dr Robert Neville, a military virologist who appears to be the last human survivor in New York City after a genetically engineered virus has destroyed civilisation and transformed infected people into nocturnal creatures known as Darkseekers. Neville spends his days hunting, gathering supplies, broadcasting radio messages and searching for a cure, while his nights are spent barricaded inside his fortified home with his dog Sam. The film combines survival drama, monster horror and large-scale disaster imagery, but its strongest element is the loneliness of one man living in the ruins of a city that was once impossibly crowded.
I Am Legend was filmed mainly in New York City, and the city is central to the film’s impact. Rather than treating post-apocalyptic New York as a fully studio-built world, the production used major real locations and then emptied, damaged and overgrew them through set dressing and visual effects. Robert Neville’s fortified home is placed at 11 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, facing Washington Square Park, giving the character a recognisable domestic base in the middle of a deserted Manhattan. Grand Central Terminal and the Park Avenue Viaduct are used for the trap sequence where Neville is caught and Sam is attacked, while the Brooklyn Bridge appears in the flashback evacuation scenes showing the collapse of the city and the military attempt to contain the outbreak. Times Square is one of the film’s most famous images, shown as an abandoned, weed-covered hunting ground where Neville pursues deer and encounters lions, although some of this material was created through sets and visual effects rather than simply filming the square as it normally exists. Other New York locations connected to the film include South Street Seaport, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Temple of Dendur, DUMBO, Tribeca, Fifth Avenue and Madison Square Park. By using real New York landmarks as empty survival spaces, I Am Legend turns the city itself into the film’s main visual idea: a place of traffic, noise and human density transformed into silence, vegetation, wild animals and isolation.
Thomas Suffern House
Thomas Suffern House has appeared in I Am Legend (2007), where its exterior represents the fortified Greenwich Village home of Dr Robert Neville.
Times Square
Times Square has appeared in Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, *batteries not included, Crocodile Dundee, Big, Vanilla Sky, I Am Legend, Enchanted, and many more.
Leave a Reply