Bordeaux, a little Paris for movie sets? Since October 25, the director Rachid Bouchareb, Caesarized for Native, shoots in the streets of Bordeaux his next film Our brothers, which looks back on the student demonstrations of 1986 in Paris and the death of Malik Oussekine. The streets of the historic center of Bordeaux, in which filming is mainly done at night, are perfectly illusory and he is not the first director to choose Bordeaux to film an intrigue taking place in the capital.
“Bordeaux has a similar architecture to Paris since we are on the Haussmanian, there are similarities but Bordeaux is not Paris. Already the city is much lower, but we can find similarities and afterwards it is a way of filming in order to be able to cheat, ”comments Marie Rateau, head of the Gironde filming reception office (see box). And the work of decoration is also very important to maintain the illusion, the time of a few shots. “This is always cinema, using a site to be able to do something else with it,” she explains.
Interiors for the Sorbonne, the Elysée …
The role of the Bureau is to offer pre-identification of places without going into the lace work of the managers and assistant directors, for the identification itself. If the streets and parks of historic Bordeaux can quickly take on a Parisian allure with the right angle, some buildings are also known to play the role of liners. “We tell them, for example, that if they are looking for something that looks like the Sorbonne, we have the University of Victoire. We know that the university, with which we operated a referencing of available places, is in favor of hosting filming, ”explains Marie Rateau.
Movies like Wretched by Robert Hossein (1982) and Queen Margot by Patrice Chéreau (1994) were partly shot in Bordeaux. Most recently, season two of the series Black Baron, directed by Ziad Doueiri, Antoine Chevrollier and Thomas Bourguignon and shot in 2017, features many Bordeaux interiors. “For example, Solférino is the administrative court of appeal and the team used the prefectural residence rue Vital-Carles to hold exhibitions at the Elysée”, specifies the head of the filming office in Gironde. And even more recently, the film crew Eiffel, released in 2021, posed its cameras for five days near the Eiffel bridge in Cubzac-les-Ponts, near Bordeaux.
The Île-de-France concentrates half of the shoots in France, so the queue for authorizations and access to certain buildings is necessarily very long. In Bordeaux, it is not the same scale and the productions appreciate saving time in their administrative procedures. “Playing Paris in Bordeaux is common but it is not massive either, nuance Marie Rateau. We also have a lot of filming on the coast ”.
After two complicated years in 2019 and 2020, 2021 promises to be a good year for the Bureau, which estimates that the Gironde hosts 300 to 350 days of filming per year. The department is becoming more and more a land for feature films whereas it has long been a setting for series, in particular because there was “a pole of production unit of fictions of France 3. [téléfilms, séries] in Bordeaux which left following the reforms of FranceTélé ”, explains the head of the filming office.
The filming office
A member of the National Film France network, the Gironde Filming Reception Office offers a free assistance service to professionals in the film industry with the idea of promoting the filming activity in the regions. Apart from documentaries and advertisements, all fictions (feature films, short films, series, etc.) shot in Gironde benefit from the expertise of the Bureau. “Either it is a project that seeks its setting, all the commissions are requested, and we will propose places according to availability, details Marie Rateau, head of the filming office in Gironde, or it is a project that has received financial aid from the region, so he has to find a filming location in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. “