No Place Like Home

Recall the expensive search for real snow that bedeviled producer Joel Silver’s last Bruce Willis picture, “Die Hard II”?

Silver’s new Willis feature, “Hudson Hawk,” a caper comedy, has faced similar travails. With a budget of about $40 million, the producers trekked across Europe searching for desirable locations--and met lots of frustration.

“If we’d known a year ago what we know now,” says co-producer Michael Dryhurst in Rome, where the film’s now shooting, “we’d have built sets in Los Angeles.”

Denied permission to shoot inside the Vatican, the filmmakers couldn’t even film the exterior of St. Peter’s--the church owns all nearby properties where cameras could be placed. They used a castle north of Rome that has doubled for the Vatican in “Godfather III” and other films.

In a search for “fresh and theoretically inexpensive” locations, Dryhurst adds, London, Budapest and Prague were considered. “The day we decided on Prague, the Czech people marched into Wenceslas Square” and started a revolution.

The production ended up in Budapest, “shooting entirely in a studio on sets that were built in Britain and transported across Europe.”

The film is due out this summer from Columbia Pictures.

About that title: “I play a thief named Hawkins,” Willis tells us. “I’m a cat burglar who grew up in Hoboken. ‘The Hawk’ is the nickname for the wind blowing in off the Hudson River. My crimes remind people of the wind.”