Martin Scorsese found a ghost hotel in Switzerland: Here's where What Happens at Night was filmed
What Happens at Night
Martin Scorsese made Gangs of New York at Cinecittà in Rome. He shot Hugo at Pinewood in London. For his new psychological horror film – a ghost story set in a decaying grand hotel in a snowbound northern European city – he went to Prague, then moved through the Czech countryside and the Swiss Alps, and ended in New York.
Principal photography began on February 24, 2026, in the Czech Republic. The film entered post-production on May 29.
The screenplay is by Patrick Marber, adapted from Peter Cameron's novel. An American couple travel to a remote, snowbound city in northern Europe to adopt a child. The Wife – weak due to a recurrent illness – seeks solace and renewal. The Husband suppresses his anxieties under a cloak of calm. Upon arrival at the decaying Grand Imperial Hotel, their carefully laid plans unravel amid eerie grandeur and disorienting rituals. Confronted by moral ambiguities and their own emotional distance, they are forced to question not only the future of the child but the viability of their marriage – and their own capacity for love.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays the Husband. Jennifer Lawrence plays the Wife. Mads Mikkelsen and Patricia Clarkson complete the core cast. Rodrigo Prieto shoots. Apple Original Films distributes. Sikelia Productions and Appian Way co-produce with StudioCanal.
Principal photography began in Prague on February 24, 2026, with a 35-day shoot across the Czech capital and surrounding region before the production moved to New York City for interiors. Prague's extraordinary density of grand historic hotels, its Central European Gothic architecture and its ability to evoke faded imperial grandeur gave the fictional Grand Imperial Hotel its primary visual identity.
In early March 2026, filming moved to Château Kotěra in Ratboř, approximately 60 kilometres east of Prague. Czech tabloid Blesk captured photographs of Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in costume on the set. The crew reportedly occupied the football field opposite the historic building, with the access road and surrounding area covered in artificial snow to create the winter atmosphere required for the story.
The historic city centre of Úštěk in northern Bohemia was notably featured – the remarkably intact medieval and Baroque town whose terraced hillside setting, its pastel-coloured houses and its cobblestone streets give it a visual character unlike most Czech towns of its size.
Production also travelled to Karlštejn Castle – the 14th-century Gothic royal castle southwest of Prague, one of the most imposing medieval fortifications in the Czech Republic – and to the Žatec region in northwestern Bohemia, famous for its Czech hop-growing traditions and its distinctive rural landscape.
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At the end of March, something happened at the Grandhotel Giessbach above Lake Brienz that almost nobody noticed. Martin Scorsese arrived with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Mads Mikkelsen. The hotel's terrace was artificially snowed. The entire Giessbach estate – the falls, the forest, the funicular – was closed to the public for four days and three nights.
The Grandhotel Giessbach at Giessbach, 3855 Brienz, Switzerland has been doing exactly what Scorsese needed since 1855. Its Belle Époque facade above a lake the colour of malachite, beside a waterfall that has been stopping people in their tracks for two centuries.
The building's cinematic history is remarkable. In 2001, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks brought the production of Band of Brothers to the Grandhotel, its facade standing in for an Austrian grand hotel in the final episode. In 2017, Paul Thomas Anderson arrived to film scenes for Phantom Thread – Daniel Day-Lewis's final film, a story about obsession and the tyranny of taste. The hotel was already the kind of place such a story demanded: preserved, particular, carrying its past in every corridor.
For What Happens at Night, the hotel does what it has always done – look like somewhere a story about the uncanny would inevitably arrive.
After the 35-day Czech shoot wrapped, the production apperantly moved to New York City for interior sequences.
No release date has been set. What Happens at Night is in post-production.
SOURCE
Icons of Interlaken // Grandhotel Giessbach // Blick // Prague Reporter // IMDb
CREDITS
© Apple Studios // Photo Niko Tavernise
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