On Set in Telluride: Movies Shot in One of Colorado’s Most Famous Towns
Everyone knows the mountain town of Telluride for its ski resorts and the world-famous Telluride Film Festival. But Telluride is also the shooting location for many popular movies both new and old. Here are some of the most notable films that used Telluride as a primary location along with neighboring areas on Colorado’s Western Slope.
These films can be rented through the Mesa County Library system, or streamed on services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
When Telluride was a mining town, outlaw Butch Cassidy robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank (now replaced by the Mahr Building) which became his first major crime on record. Then in the 1960s, a big motion picture came out called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, this iconic Western film features the titular outlaws at the height of their criminal career, including the train robberies they committed that were filmed along the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. Plus, the famous scene where Cassidy and Sundance Kid leap into a river was shot near Bakers Bridge along the Animas River between Durango and Telluride.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Disney/20th Century Fox)
Scrapple (1998)
Following the success of Dazed and Confused, a new generation of stoner movies came out that dominated the 90s and early 2000s. Scrapple is a lesser known entry into this genre, which is about the intertwined lives of ski bums in the fictional town of Ajax. But if one looks closely, a few notable Telluride landmarks become visible. The New Sheridan Bar, for example, appears as a location where the main characters frequently meet up. Also, there’s a couple of scenes filmed on the winding roads near Gateway.
Scrapple (Christopher Hanson/Sweetwater Productions)
The Prestige (2006)
Considered a unique arthouse film, The Prestige tells the story of two Victorian Era stage magicians named Angier and Borden played respectively by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. The two become rivals following a tragic accident with Borden outperforming Angier. So, Angier travels to Colorado Springs to seek out the inventor Nikola Tesla and learns the secret of Borden’s latest trick. In actuality, this sequence was shot by the Bridal Veil Falls and at Redstone Castle, a famous Victorian mansion south of Telluride that’s been converted into a hotel.
The Prestige (Newmarket Films)
Darling Companion (2012)
Although Darling Companion doesn’t have the most memorable title, it has a star-studded cast consisting of Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline and Dianne Wiest, among others. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who also did The Big Chill, this charming film is about a middle-aged couple (played by Keaton and Kline) who adopt a stray dog. Then while attending a wedding in the Rockies, the dog goes missing, and the two stay to look for him. While the movie doesn’t specify where the wedding is, there are landscape shots showing Telluride itself and the surrounding San Juan Mountains.
Darling Companion (Werc Werk Works)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Much like Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is an homage to the gritty Spaghetti Westerns of the mid-60s. Set in Wyoming sometime after the Civil War, the movie follows two bounty hunters trapped in a log cabin during a blizzard with several strangers. As people start turning up dead, it’s revealed that not everyone is who they claim to be. Surprisingly, most of the film was shot at the Schmid Ranch on Wilson Mesa near Telluride, which has been in operation since the 1880s with rental cabins and hunting packages available.
The Hateful Eight (Lantern Entertainment/Weinstein Company)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Successful anthology films are hard to pull off, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one the exceptionally good ones as it tells familiar Western stories with a postmodern twist to them. One of these stories, “All Gold Canyon,” was filmed in Colorado. Particularly the Telluride Valley and Piney River Ranch near Vail, which were combined to create the mountainous location of this story where a prospector comes looking for gold but finds trouble instead.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix/Annapurna Pictures)
Originally published in the Spring 2025 issue of Spoke+Blossom.