Written by on May 12, 2015. Posted in On Location

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks filming Dan Brown novel Inferno in Italy

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks are filming the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s Inferno on location in Italy, and in Budapest. Hanks resumes the role of Harvard professor Robert Langdon that he previously played in The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons.

Inferno sees Langdon awake in an amnesiac state in an Italian hospital where he teams with a doctor to prevent a madman from releasing a plague connected to Dante’s Inferno.

“I'm so excited to be starting production on our third Robert Langdon film,” said Howard: “Audiences everywhere have shown a tremendous appetite for the Robert Langdon adventures and Inferno has all of the intrigue and action they could want.”

Filming locations for Inferno will include the Italian cities of Venice and Florence, and also Budapest in Hungary.

Italy boosted its filming incentive programme last year after a lengthy period of uncertainty. In the months since, Rome has hosted a high-profile car chase sequence for the new James Bond movie Spectre and a big-budget remake of the historical epic Ben-Hur has become the first international film in years to shoot entirely in Italy.

“We hope that Ben-Hur is the first of many productions that will strengthen Italy’s credibility abroad and launch our productive industry,” said Ada Bonvini, head of Ben-Hur’s Rome service company Filmmaster Productions, when the shoot was first announced.

Marvel shot major action sequences for Avengers: Age of Ultron in the Aosta Valley in the north of the country and used the historic Ford Bard as a villain’s base. Several local towns were used as a double for a fictional Eastern European state.

“We were specifically looking for medieval Eastern European streets and those small towns worked as they didn’t feel much like Italy,” said Supervising Location Manager Jamie Lengyel in comments to The Location Guide: “They were attractive but felt somehow forgotten.”

(Ron Howard image: Simon Mein/Columbia Pictures)