We’ve all had unsolicited phone calls – they are a condition of modern life – ranging from heavy breathers to heavenly offers and tedious time-wasters. One of the most memorable for me started: “Hello, Ken Russell? Stanley Kubrick here, how are you? Now, tell me. Where do you find those spectacular locations? How did you find that wonderful mansion you used in your film on Tchaikovsky, for instance?”

“That’s easy, Stanley,” I said ingratiatingly. “The National Trust issues a catalogue of all its stately homes open to the public. You’ll find most of these are available for hire to responsible film companies.”

The rest is history, as anyone who has seen Barry Lyndon (1975) knows.

Location hunting can be one of the few perks in a film director’s many mundane and unsung jobs. You never can tell just what’s at the top of that country lane or around that bend in the river. It might be a crofter’s cottage or a fairy castle. I’ve found both in my time and both have led to life-changing experiences.

For instance, while researching a drama-documentary for the BBC arts programme Monitor on the great pre-Raphaelite poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I came across a must-have incident in his colourful life – a fight with gin bottles that he had with his mistress Fanny “the Elephant” Carforth on the top of the Lodore Falls in the Lake District, an area in northwest England totally unknown to me then.

So one cold day in March I set off to recce. Arriving at my destination in the dark, I was completely unaware of my surroundings until waking at dawn the next day. Pulling aside the curtains, I looked across the misty lake of Derwentwater to a truly awe-inspiring mountain, dominating the horizon, in the shape of a giant eagle about to take flight and swoop over my head. Known to Coleridge as “God made manifest” but christened Skiddaw by the ancients, this eighth wonder of the world cast a spell on me that has never lost its magic.

I was in paradise and stayed there for the next five years, shooting a series of spectacular films. These included the Rossetti biopic Dante’s Inferno (1967), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1978), Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), The Devils (1971), Tommy (1975), Mahler (1975), in which Cumbria doubled for the landscape of Austria, William and Dorothy (Wordsworth) (1978), and A British Picture (my 1989 autobiography).

But when it came to The Music Lovers (1970) and the forest of birch trees of Mother Russia, it was time to move to the New Forest. But slim as the groves of birch trees were, they were not silver. No problem, we just painted all the trunks facing the camera silver – no harm done (I was told).

Sadly, there are some places you can’t disguise – Finland in the grip of winter, for instance, with an army of heavy petrol tankers crossing the frozen Baltic Sea at night during an early thaw ( Billion Dollar Brain, 1967). No problem, we just used a snow-covered airfield. And in these conditions who can tell ice from asphalt?

Then, of course, there is the exotic location that is meant to be somewhere else. In Valentino (1977), for instance, we had exteriors to be shot on location in Arizona – a long way to go for a film based in England. No worries; El Maria in Spain is a lot closer and a lot cheaper, and after all, one prairie town looks very much like another, providing the set designers get it right.

Mostly because of financial pressure, the art of deception grows more prevalent every day. The recent Orson Welles movie Fade to Black (2007), set in the Cinecittà studios in Rome, was in fact mostly shot on the Isle of Man. Also for reasons of cost, my forthcoming film Boudica Bites Back, set in the wilds of ancient East Anglia, was filmed in a green-screen studio in Swansea, where most of the crew lived.

For every big-budget film such as Braveheart (1995) shot in the Highlands – the actual locale of the story – there’s a Liverpool doubling for Moscow in The Hunt for Red October (1990), or Prague playing Zurich in The Bourne Identity (2002). These were shot with such expertise and conviction that such concerns never crossed the minds of the average audience.

By and large audiences are a trusting bunch, though I doubt that they will actually believe that the director Morgan Spurlock recce’d every cave in Afghanistan for his upcoming epic Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? (released on May 9). Most likely he settled for the Hollywood Hills and a lookalike cavern or two.

Film folk are not generally suicidal, but there were certainly some who thought Sacha Baron Cohen was risking life and limb when he not only filmed Borat (2007) in Kazakhstan but lampooned it mercilessly while playing a politically incorrect, nutty citizen. But all is forgiven, now that the big box-office bucks for Borat have turned him into a national hero.

But the writing is on the wall and it spells CGI, which sooner rather than later will see all locations obtainable from an international cine bank, for use with the eco-friendly green screen. Ho hum, for the good old days of the open road and the recce.

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