I’m a bit late to the party – even the naffing Daily Express has found this before me – but OHMIGODTHISISFANTASTIC!
Snow Patrol have apparently nicked this 1976 short – C’etait un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch – for their latest video.
My favourite bits are the woman shitting herself at 5:22, the bloke staining his white suit at 5:49 and the pigeons just after the 7 mins mark.
Haha! This is a legendary film (original title: “C’etait un rendez-vous” 1976) about which a lot of mythology has arisen. It became popular and notorious a long time ago with Jeremy Clarkson types (petrolheads) who had seen it on ITV late at night but the film only became available on dvd a few years ago. My friend Dillon, who races MGs at weekends as a hobby, brought it to my house and we plotted the route on an AtoZ of Paris and worked out the speeds (we reckoned at its quickest on Rivoli the car went about 120mph – a little slower than some of the claims – but this is not laboratory-tested.
An extended interview with Claude Lelouch (in French) exploded some of the myths and explained how it came about. I can’t seem to find the interview now but here are some of the things that were said, from memory.
The film was shot because he had always wanted to do something like that and after wrapping Le Bon et les Mechants (1976) he found himself with a whole load of unused stock, which he didn’t tell the studio about. There were 3 people in the car; Lelouch himself had the wheel (natch), the DP and one other; the woman at the end was a paid actress who was told to mount the steps at the bell of the Sacre Coeur which meant that any delay, stoppage, traffic light during the shoot would ruin the entire shot; there were people with walkie-talkies stationed at about 4 different locations during the drive to suggest an alternative route if there was a blockage (and to give the go ahead); there is only one moment where he mounts the pavement (as they approach Montmartre) because a lorry gets in the way….the 5.22 moment!
I can tell you that the route taken, at 5am on a Sunday morning, is picturesque but highly circuitous and inefficient. It is also, insofar as it goes through the small cloistered openings in the Louvre, highly speculative and dangerous. Still…those were the days, eh?
Lelouch is a popular mainstream film director with a penchant for melodramatic star-laden epics and famously, Mike Leigh-style improvisation, some of whose films (particularly Un Homme et une Femme (Palme d’Or at Cannes), which involved race cars and whose soundtrack included the track which became the Panorama theme, and Tout Ca Pour Ca, which is the film that could arguably be credited with my marriage) are very good. More about Lelouch’s films here.
http://www.lesfilms13.com/touslesfilms/touslesfilms.htm