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PARIS NOTES

September 2003

Volume 12 Issue 7

The party guests are called from the garden into the salon. I pretend to laugh, take a last swig of champagne and cross the lawn towards the gathering of wealthy donors inside. What's this, a fund raiser" I look surprised. Olivia Pace makes a speech. Before long, someone's playing the piano, everyone's singing, "Money, money, money!" and out come the checkbooks. Hat in hand, Pace works the crowd. I drop in a 100E note.

"And! Cut!" the assistant director commands. On the set of this Merchant-Ivory production of "Le Divorce," the bubbly is just fruit juice. The hat is a prop belonging to actress Glenn Close, whose long gray-streaked hair is a wig. And the bank note isn't mine. But it is real, so after this take the extras ("figurants") are kindly asked to return the money, s'il vous plaît—even if 100 bucks is roughly what each figurant will take home in exchange for this 12-hour day filled with waiting. We wait for the actors to take their places, for the reverse-angle camera angle to be set up, for the sun to emerge from its gloomy cloud. If natural light never arrives, then we wait for technicians to install artificial sunshine.

James Ivory, the director, and Ismail Merchant, the producer, have teamed up again to transform their passion for Paris into a mitigated chaos of trailer rentals, dialog coaches, wig wranglers and second assistant directors. Based on the novel by Diane Johnson, "Le Divorce" is a comedy of manners concerning two families, one French, one American, and features American A-list stars like Sam Waterston and Stockard Channing, newcomers Naomi Watts and Kate Hudson, and French actors Leslie Caron and Thierry Lhermitte.

"I like working with new people. I like getting new faces in our films," says Ivory. "But I had always wanted to work with Leslie Caron."

Caron's screen debut was back in 1951, when she starred with Gene Kelly in the musical "An American in Paris" (Lhermitte starred in 1997's "An American Werewolf in Paris"). By casting Caron as an aloof French matron, Merchant-Ivory bookends a half-century's tradition of using Paris as a romantic, sometimes fantastic, sometimes frantic, backdrop for big-screen storytelling.

The list of films shot in Paris seems inexhaustible: from François Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" (1962) to "Superman II" (1980), Marcel Carné's "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) to "Charade" (1963, recently remade as "The Truth About Charlie"), starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Some movies recall "quartiers": who can forget the bands of scruffy Ménilmontant boys in "The Red Balloon" (1956) or Jean Seberg hawking the Herald Tribune up and down the Champs-Elysées in Godard's "A Bout de Souffle" (AKA, "Breathless," 1960)? For Woody Allen's musical "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996), the Seine was full of song and dance; two years later, in "Ronin," De Niro and Jean Reno crashed cars along the same quays, and the river became menacing. The cinema shapes the way we see the city.

Through serendipitous circumstances, I worked for three days as an extra on "Le Divorce." My first two were spent on the Rue Pavée (4th) bookstore set, where my debut as a customer registered an insignificant blip in the city's cinematic annals (see photo of Matthew Modine, Kate Hudson and a mostly obscured yours truly in the background). For one day, I also milled about a lush private residence between Rue Saint-André-des-Arts (6th) and the Seine to shoot the garden party fundraiser scene (that performance was left on the cutting room floor).

These were just two of the 30-plus locations the production used during their several week visit in the late spring of 2002—a shoot that would take the cast and crew from Charles de Gaulle airport to Jardin du Luxembourg and to the Eiffel Tower's tip. "If you're interested in France, or the French, or the idea of foreigners mixed up with France, where else could you go but Paris?" says Ivory.

"Le Divorce" is Merchant-Ivory's seventh encounter with the "city of lights, camera, action!" While this isn't the slogan of the new Mission Cinéma de la Ville de Paris, a film promotion effort on the part of the mayor, perhaps it ought to be, since it reflects a desire to project Paris as the cinema capital not only of Europe, but of the world. After all, on December 28, 1895, Boulevard des Capucines was the location of the first-ever public film screening. Impresario Georges Méliès, who also created the first film trailer and the world's first film studio just east of Paris, in Montreuil, reportedly said, "Our invention has no commercial future."

Was he ever wrong. The French connection to the "septième art" has thrived. Only India (which released 855 films in 2000), the U.S. (762), Japan (282) and Hong Kong (185) make more films each year than France (171); but in films released per capita, France beats each of these nations. Government subsidy boosts the industry at every level, from heavy investing in film production and protection of its art-house cinemas to maintaining a 6,600-film archive at the Forum des Images and the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC). Ninety percent of the film industry is based in Ile-de-France (the greater Paris area), and half of all French movies are shot in Paris, which organizes several film events each year, like the Parc de la Villette free outdoor movie series and the Festival du Film de Paris. Perhaps no other city in the world—including New York, L.A. and Bombay—so actively promotes cinema culture with as much dedication as Paris.

The cash filmmaking can pump into the local economy also may have inspired the Mairie to create the three-year-old Bureau Parisien des Tournages (Paris Film Office), which annually schedules some hundred full-length French productions alongside a thousand other requests to make short subjects, commercials and TV series in Paris. The office also helps foreign companies like Merchant-Ivory find French crews and arrange for the tricky business of securing permits from the Préfecture de Police and the guardians of city monuments.

"‘Le Divorce' was extremely enjoyable to make," Ivory says. "We've gotten used to the way they shoot in France, the involvement of everybody, the sense of democracy. It's working together in a collegiate spirit, which I don't encounter in others places where we've worked."

Shooting ("tournage") in the streets of Paris is generally free, but local residents and business associations, annoyed by blocked streets and snarled traffic, must be placated. Certain restrictions may apply, such as no filming permitted after 10pm, or forbidding any scene featuring actors dressed up like police officers. Most tournage takes place between March and September, with features often filmed between July 15 and August 30, when the streets are emptiest. Thanks in part to the success of films like "Amélie," locations like Montmartre have become the most sought-after neighborhoods, followed by the 16th, 1st, 12th, 4th and the 6th. No location is explicitly refused, but the prime spots require deep pockets. A Métro station goes for about $1,500 a day, the Eiffel Tower costs a cool $15,000. If a historical movie must eschew modern signs of life, the city charges $1,100 to remove a parking meter and $1,800 to dismantle a street lamp.

For Vincente Minnelli back in 1951, logistics like these were rarely an issue. Directing "An American in Paris," he shot only a handful of scenes here; the rest of Paris—its Technicolor backdrops of cafés and rain-slicked cobblestones—he fabricated on the back lot at a time when 50, not 15, French film studios were in business. But ever since Godard and Truffaut took New Wave filmmaking off the soundstage and into the streets, the trend has been for on-location realism. Paris became a huge film set. Every film reinvents our cinema city. Released in theaters on August 8, "Le Divorce"'s version has fake champagne and hair, but a real Tour Eiffel.