Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith | 2005

George Lucas retreats to the Fox Studios, Sydney, New South Wales, for the last of the trilogy, yet the production somehow lists more locations than ever among its locations.

Although filmed almost entirely in the studio, the film uses plenty of Second Unit background plates as a basis for its otherworldly settings. For instance, landscapes for the Wookiee planet of ‘Kashyyyk’ were filmed at the awesome limestone towers of Guilin, in the northeast corner of the Guangxi Zhuang region of southern China. It’s a ‘karst’ landscape, formed by the action of acidic water on weakly soluble bedrock, and a major tourist attraction with regular flights to Guilin Liangjiang International Airport (KWL) from major Chinese cities, including Hong Kong, as well as Kuala Lumpur, Osaka and Seoul. If you’re in no hurry, there are also trains from Beijing and Hong Kong.

Scenes for the 2006 adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil and John Woo’s 2008 epic Red Cliff were also filmed in Guilin and the surrounding area.

There are also views of the distinctive islands of Phang Nga Bay in Thailand, familiar from The Man With The Golden Gun.

The snowy peaks of ‘Alderaan’ are the Bernese Alps around Grindelwald in Switzerland. You can see more of this beautiful Alpine area in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The lava flow on ‘Mustafar’, where Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) sustains his life-changing injuries, was filmed on the slopes of Mount Etna on the east coast of Sicily. You can visit the volcano, which had previously provided savage landscapes for Biblical epic Barabbas, and for two of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, The Canterbury Tales and Theorem, on specialist tours.

And finally there’s a return to Tunisia and a location from the first film, A New Hope, for the final shot of ‘Tatooine’, which was filmed on the expansive salt flats of Chott el Jerid at Tozeur.

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