Did Dany Boon and Line Renaud really shoot in the streets of Paris for Christian Carion’s Une belle course? Focus on the backstage of the filming of the film, with an exclusive featurette.
In A great race, Line Renaud and Dany Boon cross Paris by taxi. The film directed by Christian Carionbased on a script by Cyril Gely, follows Madeleine, 92, who must go to the retirement home where she must now live. She asks Charles, a slightly disillusioned driver, to go through the places that mattered in her life, to see them one last time. Gradually, at the bend of the streets of Paris, an extraordinary past emerges that upsets Charles. There are taxi journeys that can change a life… The city of Paris and certain emblematic places occupy an entire place in the plot.
But what was the technical device to manage to shoot these many scenes in the car? As director Christian Carion points out, in the making-of video that we invite you to discover above, the idea of actually shooting in Paris was quickly discarded. “Driving and turning in Paris is very complicated“. The director explains that it was necessary to experiment for weeks, in order to find the best way to give the illusion of truly circulating in Paris.
“From the start, we started from two observations: driving in Paris today has become very complicated and therefore taking Line Renaud to do and redo scenes in traffic jams, aboard a traveling car over sections of 500 meters, c was both risky and unthinkable…”continues Christian Carion in the press kit for Une belle course.
It is thanks to its chief operator, Pierre Cottereau, that the technique was chosen, making it possible to avoid green screens, and to offer an immersive filming system for the actors and the entire technical team. “He offered me this system of LED screens that he had just experimented with on a project for Canal+. He told me that this technology was evolving rapidly and that it was worth taking an interest in… So we experimented for weeks to see how far we could go, especially with what we call “transparencies”. “.”
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The immersive filming device to give the illusion of driving in Paris
And to add:Basically, in the past, we put a screen behind the car and we projected landscapes or a road on it while we were filming. I have a lot of admiration for this device that Claude Sautet for example, at home, used a lot for his car scenes… So you will tell me that today there are green screens but that prevents the actors from visualizing what is happening around them. Everything is then done in post-production so interaction is impossible…“
We are one of the first films to use this technology to this extent
Here, no green background, but a totally immersive device. “We installed 4K screens with crazy definition in an “L” shape around the taxi in the studio, on which we broadcast the entire route taken by the taxi during the filming. Journey that we had filmed before from all angles and all axes thanks to a platform truck with multiple cameras… This even concerns the sky because we had another screen, this one facing the vehicle, which brought us light on the windshield and brought life inside the cabin…“, explains the director.
Line and Dany really had the impression that the car was starting to roll!
“Line and Dany, surrounded by these screens of 3 meters by 8 were thus in total immersion. When I said “action”, they really felt like the car was rolling! I know that Dany was a little destabilized at the start but I find that the result is stunning and that the actors can play with it.“
He concludes : “I know that we are one of the first films to use this technology to this extent: it represents almost half of the sequences in total… I am convinced that this is the future for filming in an urban environment.”
Une belle course, with Line Renaud and Dany Boon, has been on view since Wednesday, September 21.