On Friday Netflix dropped a new original film on their coffers. It’s called Leave the World Behind, and it finds Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail offering his vision of a very possible apocalypse. It’s not computers enslaving humans that’s the problem. It’s technology — phones, computers, wifi, everything we’ve come to rely on to get by — stops working. (There are also killer Teslas, which is definitely not far-fetched.) The movie’s inciting incident is a getaway house rented by one family (led by Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) but owned by another (led by Mahershala Ali). But where is this home, and where was it filmed?
The answer to both questions is: Long Island. The majority of Leave the World Behind was filmed on location, in Old Westbury, one of the wealthiest parts of what is truly a long, long island, which is saying something. Old Westbury isn’t too deep into Long Island; it’s about an hour drive from Brooklyn, though it takes over twice as long by public transportation. For some perspective it takes nearly three hours to drive from Brooklyn, at the western-most part of Long Island, to Montauk, the easternmost place (and made even more famous by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). By public transportation, it’s three hours. They weren’t kidding about that name!
Not all of Leave the World Behind was filmed on Long Island. Some scenes were filmed in Katonah, New York, about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan.
Leave the World Behind now streams on Netflix.