Amazingly, most Parisians accept this intrusion into their lifestyle almost meekly. Under normal circumstances, anyone not wearing a police uniform who was trying to get cars to stop would be ignored, insulted or hooted at, but a film shoot seems to expose a rare seam of patience in the city’s drivers. Waiting for a movie director to get his shot seems to be an acceptable reason for being stuck in traffic, on a par with a serious accident or bomb scare, and certainly much more tolerable than, say, a convoy of limousines taking world leaders to a conference.
This tolerance is reflected in the city’s seat of power itself, the Hôtel de Ville. City Hall has a department called Mission Cinéma, created in 2002 by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë purely to protect Paris’s role in the movie business. It sponsors film festivals, gives subsidies to twenty or so small independent cinemas, and makes films happen. And it obviously does a very good job—at any given time there are ten movies being shot in Paris, in some 4,400 approved locations—and that’s only the official shoots.
I went along to meet Mission Cinéma’s communications director, Sophie Boudon-Vanhille, to ask how she manages the city’s screen career.
Her office was not at all what one might expect for the head of such a glamorous city’s film bureau. No corner bay window overlooking the Eiffel Tower, no anteroom staffed by the gardienne of an appointments diary as impenetrable as The Da Vinci Code’s cryptex. It was a DVD-filled, film-poster-covered, paper-piled working room on the ground floor of a municipal building that looked out over a bus route, made glamorous only by the number of framed photos of stars thanking Sophie and Mission Cinéma for their help.
‘Paris and cinema are intimement liés’, she told me, meaning the two are intimately connected, as if they were lovers.
‘But isn’t Paris just being used just for its looks?’ I suggested. ‘It has to put up with its already congested streets getting blocked, as well as the danger that it might become over-exposed.’
‘On the contrary’, Sophie said. ‘If a film producer wants the tax breaks given to French films, the shoot has to have a quota of French technicians, and this helps to keep the country’s cinema industry alive. It creates jobs for Parisians, who are cheaper to hire because they don’t need hotels.’
This is true—whole areas of the city like Jourdain in the 19th and the nearby suburb of Montreuil are home to masses of intermittants du spectacle (‘occasional entertainment-industry workers’)—directors, actors, cameramen, light and sound engineers, electricians and who knows what, all being paid generous unemployment money between shows and film shoots, on permanent standby, like fighter pilots waiting to be sent on a life-and-death mission to save French culture.
‘We are also helping to raise the city’s profile,’ Sophie said. Well, what she actually talked about was le rayonnement de la ville, an expression that made Paris sound like a beacon. ‘Movies attract visitors, so we do everything we can to make it easy for producers to set their films here.’ As if to prove her point, a hubbub of activity erupts on the other side of the glass partition. It is, I am told, a production team asking for urgent permission to film.
‘Will they get the go-ahead?’ I ask, knowing how frustrating life can be in France if forms are not sent to offices well in advance.
‘Of course.’
‘Even if they want to film on the Champs-Élysées or outside the Louvre?’
‘It depends. If someone else is filming there on the dates they want, they are too late. There is no favouritism. It is first come, first served, even if they want to film in Montmartre or on the Pont des Arts.’
And doesn’t it annoy her, I ask, that everyone seems to want the same clichéd shots?
Far too diplomatic to answer directly, she tells me: ‘To take pressure off over-used locations, we send screenwriters on guided tours of lesser-known areas and suggest that these might inspire plotlines. For example, to Rungis food market or on a trip with the Seine river police.’
This gives me a chance to quote some figures at her. On the excellent parisfilm.fr website, there is a long list of the fees charged to film at various types of location. It’s all very scientific. The city’s museums are divided into price categories—Musée 1 includes the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Carnavalet and the Petit Palais (4,000 euros a day* plus a crew fee—for example, 400 euros if there’s a crew of between eleven and twenty people); Musée 2 includes smaller museums like Victor Hugo’s and Balzac’s former homes and the Musée de la Vie Romantique (2,500 euros plus the same crew fee as a Musée 1); while other less glamorous locations such as the catacombs and public libraries cost 480 euros plus the standard crew fee.
I ask Sophie about a couple of quirky charges. Apparently, it costs 400 euros to film by a canal, plus 40 to use a boat, and 62 for a bridge. Why 62?
Sophie looks up the list on her computer, shakes her head and confesses she has no idea who thought up that particular euro-earner for the city.
I have also noticed that some fees include royalties. So is Paris copyrighted? Can it charge a percentage of the box office for showing the Eiffel Tower?
‘No, no,’ Sophie says. ‘It costs nothing to film Paris other than an administration fee to organize things. The only buildings that charge royalties are the ones whose architect is still living. The Louvre pyramid, for example. That is an image that still belongs to I. M. Pei. If it’s in a film or a photo, he must get royalties.’
‘But before he built his pyramid, the Louvre was free?’
‘Yes.** And
