CREDITS LEON – THE PROFESSIONAL, 1994 dir: Luc Besson Jean Reno Natalie Portman Gary Oldman Danny Aiello

“You don't like Beethoven. You don't know what you're missing. Overtures like that get my... juices flowing. So powerful. But after his openings, to be honest, he does tend to get a little fucking boring. ”

Luc Besson’s stylish thriller with hitman Léon (Jean Reno) versus rampantly OTT crooked cop Stansfield (Gary Oldman) is set in New York, but most of the studio shooting took place in Paris.

Real NY exteriors include Spanish Harlem, Chinatown and Wall Street; plus Hoboken and West New York, New Jersey.

‘Tony’s’, Danny Aiello’s restaurant, supposedly in Little Italy, was Guidoís, 511 9th Avenue at West 38th Street, south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was a wonderfully down-to-earth Italian restaurant in a room behind the Supreme Macaroni Co store but, as you can see, it's no more.

Guido's - no more. Photograph: Dan James

The hotel of precocious Mathilda (Natalie Portman), where she loses her family in a savage attack, 71 97th Street at Park Avenue on the Upper East Side, or so it seems.

The stairwells look just a little too expansive for the modest 97th Street building. The stairwell and corridors are those of the Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The Chelsea has far too much history to list here: Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001 while staying here, Andy Warhol filmed The Chelsea Girls, Bob Dylan wrote Sad Eyed lady of the Lowlands... and on.

It's now probably remembered in pop culture as the hotel in which Nancy Spungen died and Sid Vicious was arrested – see Alex Cox's Sid And Nancy, which filmed within the hotel.

It's not a five-star haven of luxury, in fact, it can be a little ramshackle, but that's the charm of the Chelsea – there really is nowhere quite like it.