The Love Hypothesis Filming Locations

The Love Hypothesis takes Ali Hazelwood’s academic romance out of the reader’s imagination and places Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen inside a surprisingly tangible university world. Lili Reinhart plays Olive, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate whose attempt to convince her best friend that she has moved on from an old crush leads to an impulsive arrangement with the intimidating Dr. Adam Carlsen, played by Tom Bateman. Director Claire Scanlon keeps much of that romance surrounded by laboratories, lecture spaces, libraries, lawns and the everyday movement of graduate-school life. Stanford may be central to the story, but the real campus behind much of the movie is hundreds of miles away, and the production actually assembled its version of California academia across Canada and Southern California.

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Montreal was the main production base

The Love Hypothesis was filmed primarily in Montreal, Quebec, where the production spent much of July and August 2025. ACTRA Montreal records the local shoot as running from July 14 through August 29, while other production listings place the beginning a few days earlier, making mid-July through the end of August the safest description of the principal photography period. Lili Reinhart has also spoken about spending roughly two months making the movie in Montreal, confirming that the Canadian city carried the majority of the production.

Montreal is a practical choice for a story that requires far more than a few generic college exteriors. Olive’s world is built around graduate research, university offices and relationships formed inside an academic community, so the filmmakers needed buildings that could function convincingly as a major American research institution. Rather than trying to construct all of that environment on soundstages, the production could take advantage of genuine university architecture already available in the city.

Concordia University became Stanford

The most important confirmed Montreal location is Concordia University’s Loyola Campus. Concordia itself has confirmed that Prime Video transformed parts of Loyola into Stanford University for The Love Hypothesis, making this much stronger evidence than simply identifying similar-looking buildings from the trailer. Production designer Elise de Blois, herself a Concordia graduate, returned to the campus to reshape familiar spaces for Olive and Adam’s fictional academic world.

The transformation involved more than changing signs outside buildings. De Blois explained that the production converted the campus cafeteria and created a large library environment intended to resemble a space at a university such as Stanford. The Department of Biology also assisted the filmmakers, which was especially useful for a movie centered on scientists and graduate research rather than a conventional college romance with little interest in what its characters actually study.

That use of real academic spaces seems to have mattered to the cast as well. Reinhart recalled students approaching her and Rachel Marsh during filming in Montreal because they appreciated the novel’s portrayal of women working in science. It is a small behind-the-scenes detail, but one that fits the production strategy: Olive’s university is not simply a decorative campus surrounding a romance, but a working scientific environment that shapes her ambitions.

Caltech also stood in for Stanford

Montreal was not the only university used to create Stanford. The production later filmed for about a week at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, turning another real scientific institution into part of Olive’s fictional campus. Caltech’s student newspaper reported that filming took place around several parts of the university, including Kerckhoff and the area around Caltech Hall Pond.

Caltech officials explained that productions regularly approach the university when they need architecture capable of representing another prestigious college. For The Love Hypothesis, that offered an obvious advantage: the story could retain the look of an elite California research campus without requiring the production to work extensively at Stanford itself. The result is a screen campus built from pieces of at least two real universities rather than one location photographed from every possible angle.

Was The Love Hypothesis actually filmed at Stanford?

Despite Stanford being essential to Olive’s story, there is no reliable production record identifying Stanford University itself as one of the movie’s principal filming sites. Concordia has openly confirmed that Loyola Campus was remodeled to resemble Stanford, while Caltech has similarly described itself as a Stanford stand-in. Those two first-hand accounts make it clear that the filmmakers did not simply shoot the university scenes where the novel places them.

That kind of substitution is common, but it works particularly well here because both campuses offer something useful to the adaptation. Concordia supplied much of the practical interior and exterior university environment during the main Montreal shoot, while Caltech contributed authentic Southern California academic architecture. Together, they allow the finished film to feel geographically consistent even though the locations were photographed in two countries.

Los Angeles was used for additional filming

The production eventually returned to California for more than the Caltech material. Reinhart and Rachel Marsh said that author Ali Hazelwood was not present during the main Montreal shoot, but later joined the filmmakers when reshoots took place in Los Angeles. Public reporting does not provide a detailed address list for that additional photography, so it would be misleading to assign particular finished scenes to specific Los Angeles buildings without further confirmation.

The Los Angeles work appears to have been additional photography rather than a replacement for Montreal’s role as the main production center. Even one of the film’s more private interior sequences was shot in Montreal, according to Reinhart and Bateman, who recalled filming late into the night while people outside the location could see activity through an open window. The anecdote offers another indication of how much of the movie, including material that could easily have been recreated elsewhere, remained tied to the Canadian shoot.

Montreal gives the movie more than a convenient double

What makes The Love Hypothesis location work interesting is that its university setting was not created by choosing one building and repeatedly pretending it was Stanford. Concordia’s Loyola Campus supplied a substantial academic environment, the production team physically redesigned interiors for the film, and Caltech later added another layer of authentic research-campus architecture. The locations were stitched together to create a university that belongs to the story rather than to any single real campus.

That approach suits Hazelwood’s material particularly well. Olive and Adam’s relationship may provide the romantic hook, but laboratories, research funding and academic careers are not incidental decorations around them. By filming inside genuine universities in Montreal and Pasadena, Scanlon’s adaptation gives that side of the story enough physical credibility that the fake relationship can unfold inside a world that feels considerably more real.