Former Disney star Sofia Carson is once again charming Netflix audiences, this time with her new romantic comedy The Life List, which began streaming today.
Written and directed by Adam Brooks (also known for the 2008 rom-com Definitely, Maybe), who adapted the 2013 best-selling novel of the same name by Lori Nelson Spielman, The Life List stars Carson as a woman struggling to find herself in life. After her mother (played by Emmy-nominated actor Connie Britton) dies a slow death of cancer, Alex is surprised to learn that she will not be receiving the same inheritance as her siblings. At least, not until she completes her “life list,” aka a list of goals she wrote for herself when she was 13 years old. It’s her mother’s way of helping her daughter get out of a rut, even from beyond the grave.
Also starring Kyle Allen, Sebastian de Souza, and Maria Jung, The Life List is funny, cathartic, and romantic. And like so many other iconic romantic comedies before it, The Life List takes place in the bustling New York City. But just because a movie takes place in one location doesn’t always mean it was filmed there. Read on to learn more about The Life List filming locations.
No Hollywood tricks here: The Life List was filmed on location in New York City and the surrounding area. Both The Life List director Adam Brooks and The Life List producer Liza Chasin are New Yorkers themselves.
“I’ve spent most of my adult life in New York, and as a child, I came here all the time,” director Brooks said in an interview for The Life List press notes. “My father was from Brooklyn. He grew up a mile from where the “Rose House” is in Ditmas Park. I think that part of the charm and the strength of movies like this, is making the locations feel viable and real.”
So you better believe those scenes on the subway, in Washington Square Park, and along the Brooklyn promenade were really filmed in those real locations.
“I wanted to make sure there were no postcard shots,” Brooks said in that same interview for The Life List press notes. “For instance, there’s a scene where Alex is walking with her sister-in-law along the Brooklyn Promenade, and as they’re walking, the camera follows them. They come around a corner and the glistening city skyline reveals itself in the background as they’re talking. It’s a beautiful shot, but it’s not a postcard. I wanted the city to reveal itself the way it does when you live here, and you’re not paying close attention until inevitably you stumble upon a corner or a park or a building that reminds you of the power and beauty of the city. We capture the romance of New York, but in a way that feels like the city truly belongs to the characters.”
For the scenes that take place in Burlington, Vermont, where Alex’s long-lost father lives, those were actually filmed in upstate New York in Nyack, NY. The restaurant where Alex first finds her dad, Purdy’s, is actually a Japanese place, Wasabi restaurant, in Nyack, according to a report from Rockland/Westchester Journal News.
According to that same report, the production also filmed at the First Reformed Church of Nyack on South Broadway.