There is something counterintuitive, then, in that his films are set on the North Shore, the collection of coastal (and coastal adjacent, in real-estate speak) towns along Lake Michigan — places like Evanston, Glencoe, Highland Park and Des Plaines — that are often dismissed as affluent and culturally homogeneous. But Mr. Hughes, whose father was a roofing salesman, used these communities to explore issues of class, status and consumerism as well as the tension and attraction between suburb and city in ’80s America.

Image The director John Hughes in 1984. His best-known films, tales of youth like “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club,” also captured his adopted hometown in the Chicago suburbs. Credit... Associated Press

I had come to the North Shore looking for Mr. Hughes, for traces of what fed his filmmaking and for hints of how his hometown had changed in the 30 years since he painted it as an American Every Town. Online, I had found fan sites listing his many Chicago-area shooting locations: Glenbrook North High School, where Judd Nelson triumphantly raises his fist on the football field at the end of “The Breakfast Club” (and from which Mr. Hughes graduated); the college town of Evanston, where Anthony Michael Hall cruises in a Rolls-Royce down Central Street in “Sixteen Candles”; the glass house in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” from which Cameron’s father’s 1961 Ferrari explodes. I could have wandered aimlessly around these touchstones, but on a whim, I reached out to Mr. Hughes’s oldest son, John Hughes III, hoping he might also point me to some of his father’s off-camera hangouts. The Hughes family is famously private, but to my surprise, he offered to give me a tour. (Look back at highlights from the Hughes filmography with this list of selected locations.)

And that is how I ended up in the basement of a police station with John Hughes III and two state police officers. The building’s facade, imposing in a Soviet sort of way, looked exactly as I remember it from “The Breakfast Club,” when it played the role of Shermer High (it had been Maine North High, which closed in 1981). Mr. Hughes parked, and we walked around the back, curious if its football field was still there. A squad car slowed beside us. “Can we help you,” one officer asked, in the way that officers do when they mean “What are you doing here?”

It might have been all the John Hughes movies I had been watching, movies that I had seen over and over growing up, but I was suddenly struck by the impulse to run, like one of the filmmaker’s teenage characters up to no good. Instead, I froze. So Mr. Hughes’s son took over, bending his long frame to talk through the window. His dad had filmed a movie here years ago, he explained. Maybe they had heard of it? Immediately, everything changed. “Do you want to see the inside?” one officer asked, clearly excited. “I’m obsessed with that movie.”

As we sped through the empty corridors, no longer lined with lockers, I didn’t know what we were looking for. The officers wanted to show us something, but even in their own station, they were lost. I flashed to the Brain, the Athlete, the Basket Case, the Princess and the Criminal, racing through these halls, sliding on the linoleum, nearly getting caught by Principal Vernon. “You didn’t get the smartest, but we’re definitely the nicest,” one of the officers said. “And the most handsome,” the other added. Finally, they found it, a modest shrine to the building’s previous life as one of the most famous high schools in American film: a handful of generic artifacts in an old trophy case.