Filming Permits in Hungary

Thanks to this new system, authorities can issue space reservation permits for filming within a target processing time of 5 days under a very simple one-door permitting process, even for the most prominent and most frequented tourist attractions of the city. In urgent cases, for an extra fee this time can be reduced to 3 days.

Cleaning up Andrassy after filming a scene for "Bel Ami"Open on Flickr

In some cases the whole permitting process can be more than 5 days if other authorities have to be involved. In case of full road closure before the filming permit a traffic management plan should be made and approved by the local public transportation authorities and the police department. The waiting time of this process depends on the exact street and area, but it can be from 4 days to 10 days.

The permit fees for the requested areas are calculated by square meters. There are three different types of areas with varying fees for film shooting permits: parking area, technical area and shooting area. Usually for the parking area, Progressive Productions asks to have the permission 24 hours before the shoot date in order to have the possibility to clear the area from other parked cars.

Thanks to this film friendly regulation with its one-door transparent process, Progressive Productions can easily handle all the paperwork and keep an eye on the process to make it as smooth as possible. We do the whole location management of the film or photo shoot from the scout session to the last moments of the shoot. As excellent location management is one of the crucial pillars of a successful production, for the last few years Progressive Productions has been putting huge efforts into this area.

For example, the Andrássy Boulevard is one of the most representative and heavily used historic roads in the center of Budapest, lined with monumental tenement buildings, palaces and villas. Regardless of it having a key role in the life of the Hungarian capital, it is actually surprisingly simple to close down sections of it due to its structure. Among the boulevard’s six car lanes, four of the central ones are framed on both sides with tree-lined pavements for pedestrians, separating them from the two further lanes on each side. These outer two lanes provide everything a filmmaker needs if they wish to shoot a scene using atmospheric architecture, pavements, trees and one car lane. In this case, road closure and permits are a simple procedure, since traffic can continue in the inner main lanes undisturbed, minimising the waiting time and costs of gaining permission. Naturally, the inner lanes can also be closed for shoots, but that costs more time and money.

Also, if an epic car chase scene connecting multiple roads is needed, vast closures can also be issued. For example for the Hungarian movie The Whisky Robber a 2.5 km-long section was closed off affecting large sections of four connecting roads in the District VII so that they were able to film a heated car chase in one take. The architecture in this area, as well as in Districts V, VI and VIII are very typical of the city’s golden age, full of beautifully designed, large, hundred-year-old tenement houses. Traffic here is often only in one direction and since city planning here was done in a grid structure, diverting traffic here does not cause a large disturbance in the lives of the locals.

While some streets are chosen for Budapest’s iconic turn of the century atmosphere, other streets are sought after because of their uncanny resemblance to other European capitals, or more often their images decades or even centuries ago. These are generally areas with narrower cobblestone streets and historic architecture of a smaller scale. Although Budapest has been known to double as cities such as Munich, Moscow, and Berlin, undoubtedly its potential to create a Parisian atmosphere is most dominant. Since this is such a strong element for some when choosing Budapest as the location of their shoot, we have created a Location gallery that specialises in these parts of the city. Many of these locations can be found around the State Opera House, among which quite a few areas are pedestrianised enabling simpler road closures.

Regardless, some extremely creative filmmakers have even been able to utilize the traits of this city to depict places that seemingly have little in common with Central Europe. For example, the American TV series drama called the Alienist used a street in central Budapest for an establishing shot to situate the story in 1896’s New York. Although this is located downtown, it actually does not have heavy traffic, enabling permit issuing to be a simple process.

Other cities around Hungary are also open to and experienced in large scale road closures for international productions. For multiple scenes of the movie In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie took her crew to shoot in streets and bridges of Esztergom, while the historic center of the city Sopron was featured in Netflix’s The Crown. They closed down the main square and the roads opening from it to shoot the funeral scene of members of the Windsor family set in Darmstadt, Germany.