French film-maker Luc Besson opened his Film City, a vast studio complex created in a disused power station to offer Hollywood-style facilities right on the edge of Paris.
I had always said I’d love to make our own films here in France
“I had always said I’d love to make our own films here in France,” Besson told an opening ceremony under the glass and steel vaults of the 1930s plant, a giant turbine, brightly painted by local street artists towering in its centre.
“Whereas Americans say ‘Yes We Can’, here in France our motto tends to be ‘Dream On!’. Pessimism is something of a national sport.”
“So I thank you from the bottom of my heart for believing in this dream,” the 53-year-old director and producer told the gathering of French politicians, film executives and project partners.
The €170 million Cité du Cinema, a project 12 years in the making, aims to plug a gap in the French production landscape, as a studio able to see a movie project through from A to Z, just next to the world’s most filmed city.
As well as nine film sets, totalling 9,500 square metres, it houses a vast office complex including EuropaCorp’s new headquarters, carpentry, costume and model-making workshops, production and post-production facilities.
“France has Europe’s biggest film industry and yet until now it was the only European country without the infrastructure to produce a film,” said Christophe Lambert, general director of Besson’s production firm.
Back in 1997, Besson had to spend 18 months in Britain to shoot his sci-fi blockbuster The Fifth Element. “I went with a heavy heart,” recalled the director.
So in 2000, the film-maker set out to create a studio complex that would make it possible to create a film in France from A to Z.
For the site he chose an Art Deco-style former thermal power plant in Saint Denis, a working-class north Paris suburb, which he had used to shoot scenes from two hitman dramas, the 1990 Nikita and the 1994 The Professional.
Besson started filming there again this summer for his new movie Malavita, a Mafia drama starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. The site was thrown open on Saturday for a one-off tour of what is being dubbed “Hollywood on Seine”.