Dhruv Sharma
It has almost been a decade now since ‘Lost’ released its Season 6 finale, but even now, many fans of the show can’t stop raving about it. Its basic premise revolves around the lives of the passengers of a crashed plane, who are stranded on a seemingly desolate island. But as they delve further into the mysteries of their crash site, they come across some otherworldy, supernatural discoveries that completely alter their perspective of the world they live in.
The show has twists and turns in literally every corner and as the name suggests, along with the passengers of the plane, even you feel “lost” as a viewer. If you’ve seen even one season of the show, you’re probably wondering where it was filmed. Well, here’s everything you need to know about it.
Lost Filming Locations
The pilot of ‘Lost’ begins with a plane crashing on a mysterious island and in the scenes that follow, the surviving passengers of the plane deduce that crashed on a beach somewhere between Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles, California. However, the actual filming location of almost the entire series is on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
In its bloated runtime of 118 episodes, the show also features other locations from all over the world, including California, New York, Iowa, Miami, South Korea, Iraq, Nigeria, United Kingdom, Paris, Thailand, Berlin, Maldives, and Australia. However, none of these locations were actually used for filming. The Hawaiian Captial Honolulu was used as a stand-in for almost all of these locations.
Oahu, Hawaii
The pilot episode of the show introduces us to the 48 survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. Most of the island scenes in this episode were filmed at Mokule’ia Beach, which lies on Oahu’s Northern Shore. All the cave scenes of the first season were filmed in an abandoned Xerox parts warehouse, which has not been used since a mass shooting took place in it back in the late 90s. Much later, when the second season of the show was being filmed, its production offices were transferred to the Hawaii Film Office-operated Hawaii Film Studio. All the “Swan Station” scenes in the second season and the “Hydra Station” scenes in the third were filmed here.
In the second episode, three survivors, Jack, Kate, and Charlie, go looking for the plane’s cockpit in the depths of the forest that surrounds them on the island. This scene and many others were filmed in the Ka’a’awa Valley on Oahu’s Windward Coast. In the past, this valley has also been used as a filming location for many other well-known films like ‘50 First Dates‘, ‘Godzilla‘, ‘Pearl Harbour‘, and ‘Tears of the Sun.’ There are also several scenes in the first season in which a giant banyan tree can be spotted. In one of the episodes, Charlie was also hung on this tree by another character named Ethan. This banyan tree is located close to Oahu’s Turtle Bay resort, and many other scenes of the show have been filmed in and around this resort.
Emilie de Ravin, who plays Claire’s role in the show, recently posted a “throwback picture” of the show on her Instagram. Check it out below:
For the most part, ‘Lost’ is very character-oriented, and each episode subtly foreshadows each character’s past through backstories. In one of the episodes, the show features a backstory that reveals how the Korean couple, Jin and Sun, met each other. The beautiful scene in which the two of them get married was filmed at the Byodo-In Temple in the Valley of the Temples off of the Kahekili Highway in Kane’ohe.
In a similar fashion, the creators of the show had improvised many places in Oahu and had disguised them as other locations. Even the airport scenes were all filmed in the Hawaii Convention Center. Moreover, scenes featuring the Iraqi Republican Guard installation and the Dharma Initiative research station were all filmed in an old World War II bunker. To get an extensive guide to all the locations where ‘Lost’ was filmed, refer to the map below:
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