Baz Luhrmann

While the Australian director shot all of Moulin Rouge! on a set in Sydney, the popularity of the musical renewed interest in the Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre. Expectations were so high for his big-budget blockbuster Australia that Tourism Australia worked with Luhrmann and his studio on a major tourism campaign, called See the Movie, See the Country. But also check out Luhrmann’s breakthrough feature, Strictly Ballroom, for a much less epic but far more acutely observed view of ordinary inner-city Australia.

Wong Kar-wai

While Jackie Chan showed off exotic lands to Hong Kong audiences, Wong Kar-wai showed Western audiences a new side of Hong Kong with his arthouse hits. Chungking Express was a dizzying ride through Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui and the Soho area of Central. Though mostly filmed in Bangkok, both In the Mood for Love and 2046 were grand, romantic recreations of 1960s Hong Kong. He also filmed martial arts drama Ashes of Time in the Gobi Desert, set his gay drama Happy Together almost entirely in Argentina and took on the American road movie genre with My Blueberry Nights.

Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola turned the cafe overlooking Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing into a tourist attraction with Lost in Translation. The film changed the Western idea of Tokyo, reinventing it as a hip metropolis that is at once intimate and exotic. Coppola – daughter of Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola – gave a similar treatment to the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles in Somewhere, and she filmed Marie Antoinette with unprecedented access to the Palace of Versailles.

Werner Herzog

The German director is best known for films that examine the clash between man and nature. In addition to his Amazon-set epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Herzog has also directed documentaries set in France’s Chauvet Caves (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), the US state of Alaska (Grizzly Man), Russia (Happy People: A Year in the Taiga) and Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World).

Bernardo Bertolucci

The Italian director, who died late last year, made some of his most famous films outside his home country. Last Tango in Paris and The Dreamers were set in the French capital, while The Last Emperor was the first Western movie to obtain official permission to film in Beijing’s Forbidden City. In addition, The Sheltering Sky was mostly filmed in the desert of Morocco and Algeria, and his 1993 epic Little Buddha was filmed on location in Nepal and Bhutan.