In the middle of wheat fields, harmonious Haussmannian facades: the first permanent exterior sets in France have emerged from the ground in Seine-et-Marne and offer a real “sandbox” to film and series directors 50 km from Paris , capital overloaded with filming requests.
From the carriage entrances to the entrance to a metro station, these settings – a “backlot” in the jargon – of the streets of Paris constitute “the project of a lifetime” for Thierry de Segonzac, president of TSF studios.
“Explosions, demonstrations, shootings, fires: everything that today the public roads no longer allow to be filmed, the filmmakers can do it here,” smiles the owner of the new fake Parisian district.
For him, “the absence of a backlot in France was really an anomaly”.
In the 1960s, the New Wave movement led French cinema towards more natural settings, abandoning studios.
Over the years, France has invested little and its delay over its European neighbors has been obvious with the entry into the dance of streaming platforms, at the origin of “heavy series in production, sometimes even more important than feature films”, underlines Thierry De Segonzac.
Of the 300 million euros directed to the film industry, as part of the France 2030 public investment plan, 14 were allocated to new sets in Seine-et-Marne.
“One of our missions is to sell the France destination to host filming,” explains Olivier Henrard, interim president of the National Cinema Center (CNC) for whom this backlot offers “all the advantages of Paris without the disadvantages of Paris”.
Visiting the site on Wednesday, the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati affirmed how “these are important investments for the cinema ecosystem”, assuring her “political will to develop French cinema, to preserve its financing tool” .
The minister strolls along the gravel of a small, typically Parisian interior courtyard where Johann George, TSF’s head decorator, praises the modularity of the installations.
The glass roof on the ground floor of this courtyard “could be a printing workshop from the beginning of the century as well as a coworking office in 2024”, enthusiastically testifies the guide to this Paris in Potemkin village version.
– “Zidane Gate” –
Lost in the wilderness, this backlot has already been admired by 1.5 billion people: viewers of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
While walking on “the grand boulevard”, Thierry De Segonzac raises his arm in the direction of the “Zidane Gate” because it is not in Paris but in this setting that the idol of French football, Olympic flame in hand, He made his way through a Jacques Tati-style traffic jam.
A shoot better kept than a state secret for a result of 36 seconds: “A very, very nice business card”, laughs the boss of the studio, accustomed to promoting its 30 hectares of available land.
In addition to these Parisian streets, the construction of twelve classic studios, from 600 to 4,000 square meters, will begin in 2025.
To avoid the repeated destruction of sets via this backlot, TSF also provides storage spaces, all with little artificialization of the soil because the whole thing is built on the pre-existing concrete tracks of a former NATO air base. .
Walking these real fake streets of Paris for the first time, filmmaker Cédric Klapisch has an eye for details.
“I missed the existence of this place by almost three months. I would have liked to have had something like that because filming in Paris has become complicated,” confides the director of Péril Jeune and L’Auberge. Spanish.
He, who has just filmed actors on board an omnibus, on a green screen, “needs to have the buildings scroll and here, that would have been quite easy to do”, he adds.
“Here it’s a sandbox, it’s a place where you can play,” Klapisch concludes with a smile.
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