Welcome to the Shot at Trinity website. Trinity College Dublin’s historic buildings have been used as the setting for many films and television shows over the years and now you are invited to take a virtual tour of those locations. Fans of that classic version of the Pygmalion story, Educating Rita, with Julie Walters and Michael Caine, can revisit the interiors and exteriors of Trinity’s Graduates Memorial Building and Exam Hall as Rita and Frank learn to accommodate each other’s prejudices and expectations in the rarefied atmosphere of academe. But this wasn’t the first occasion where Trinity’s imposing architecture doubled for British locations. Other entries include John Guillermin’s The Blue Max from 1966, Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery from 1978, and more recently Neil Jordan’s Byzantium of 2012. Global visitors to this site might also be familiar with the delirious over-the-top celebration of Trinity’s campus in the Bollywood hit, Ek Tha Tiger, of 2012.
Although Trinity was founded in 1592, most of the featured buildings date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Exam Hall and College Chapel were designed by William Chambers and completed in the period 1775-1797. The Graduates Memorial Building was designed by Sir Thomas Drew in 1897 and is home to the College’s two famed debating societies, the University Philosophical Society (the Phil) and the College Historical Society (the Hist). Many of the sequences feature Trinity’s cobbled Front Square (or as it is correctly called, Parliament Square). Another historic site used, for instance, in Byzantium is Trinity’s ornate Long Room Library, which was built between 1712 and 1732.
However, not all the films and TV shows are set in the old parts of Trinity. Some make use of the college’s airy new buildings, notably the new Ussher Library of 2003, with its tall glass atrium looking out over the cricket pitch.
This site is an initiative of the Department of Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin and entries on the films and television programmes are accompanied by short essays by staff and students of the Department. You will also find suggestions for further reading and brief reviews.
If you know of any film that we may have omitted (currently the site only covers fiction films), do please contact us. If you were an extra on any of the films and would like to share your memories of that process, we would welcome contributions from the general public. Or if you have photographs of any of the films as they were shot that you would like to share with visitors to the site, do please let us know. All feedback is welcome.
Enjoy your visit!