This evening, TF1 is broadcasting the first episodes of the series Cat's Eyes with a high-flying first episode in which Tamara climbs the Eiffel Tower. Did Camille Lou, her interpreter, perform her own stunts?
It's undoubtedly the event series of this fall!
This Monday, November 11, TF1 is broadcasting the first 2 episodes of Cat's Eyes, a live-action adaptation of the cult 80s manga by Tsukasa Hôjô.
This series, which is similar to a prequel, explores the origins of the Cat's Eyes and sets its action in Paris in 2023. After several years of separation, Tam (Camille Lou), Sylia (Constance Labbé) and Alexia (Claire Romain), three sisters, meet again. When a work, which could be the key to shedding light on the conditions in which their father disappeared 10 years earlier in the mysterious fire of his art gallery, resurfaces during an exhibition at the Eiffel Tower, Tam decides to steal it.
It is therefore at the Eiffel Tower that the first episode of Cat's Eyes opens with a scene where Tam is perched several dozen meters above the ground and unrolls a kakemono representing a Japanese work that belonged to her father. What follows is a breathtaking chase between the young woman and the police in every corner of this emblematic monument of Paris.
The impressive stunts follow one another and reveal an intrepid Tam. We can see her climbing the Eiffel Tower with bare hands and without a safety net or even walking on a metal beam above the void…
Watching these spectacular scenes, a question arises: did Camille Lou, the interpreter of Tam Chamade, perform her stunts herself?
Did Camille Lou perform her own stunts?
For the purposes of the series, Camille Lou underwent intensive training to fit the specificities of her character. If she followed sports preparation for the race, learned stunt and fight choreography, she also took climbing lessons with Williams Belle, the founder of the Yamakasi for the purposes of the scenario.
Concerning the stunts on the Eiffel Tower, Camille Lou did not perform them all. “It's Chloé Henry, who is a former gymnast who won Ninja Warrior, who climbs the Eiffel Tower. She was the one who climbed the edge of the Eiffel Tower. I would have loved to do it, but it would have had to be the last day and the last sequence (laughs)“, explained the actress during a press briefing organized during the La Rochelle Fiction Festival last September.
For his part, Alexandre Laurent, the director, added that the moments where Tam's character almost falls during the ascent were produced with special effects. About this he told us, “The times she almost falls while climbing, it's not her. Even the stuntwoman didn't do it. It's a VFX. We put a beam in a studio, we did lots of filming with the cable cam. The real shots are very wide shots where we see the stuntwoman going up“.
Although Camille Lou did not climb the Eiffel Tower, it is however she who we see deploying the kakemono several meters from the ground and acting out the chase scenes on the stairs.
For the little anecdote, the actress specified, “You should know that the Eiffel Tower moves when there is wind. If it doesn't move, it collapses. With the wind, it moved quite a bit. You should also know that there are lots of small holes in the stairs. These are stairs that do not hide the void at all. We constantly see emptiness. I was often sitting there, waiting for time to pass so we could shoot because I couldn't look down. Even if we don't have vertigo, we all end up having it at some point.“.
