car speeding through Paris streets and the story
Somebody posted this video of a car racing through empty Paris streets to Burning Man mailing list. It turns out father of one of the members of the list had actually interviewed the director back in the day.
Great story.
http://www.jungle-life.com
Hi, sweetie,
Ironically, I interviewed Claude LeLouche in 1986 at the Cannes Film Festival when he was there for the debut of Man and A Woman 20 Years Later. That film was mediocre, though the earlier version of M&W was a classic love story and there are some fascinating stories about the making of that film. The interview was going poorly and I asked the writer Jack Matthews if I could ask LeLouche a couple questions about another of his films. Jack, dying for anything to talk about, encouraged me, and LeLouche lit up like a Christmas tree when he found out I knew about his film. It was one of his proudest accomplishments, he said. Here is why.
A technical adviser on the original film shot in 1966, Maurice Trintignant, was the brother of the film’s star Jean-Louis Trintignant. One day they were talking over lunch about great races and drives Mo had done, and he told the story of once making it from Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt at the River Seine, up to Sacre Coeur Cathedral in about 11 minutes on one Sunday morning in August. Everyone at the table guffawed. This was roughly 11 miles in 11 minutes through a dense and twisty city. Mo had left one woman and was about to be late for another rendezvous with another girlfriend. Maurice was very VERY handsome in his youth, he was a Ferrari team Formula One race driver, he had run in the 24-hours of LeMans many times for Ferrari and others, he was very wealthy, and he was very well known all over France.
LeLouche was enthralled with the tale, and after a few days of talking about it, they eventually decided it would make a wonderful short subject film. No dialog, actual sound, camera strapped inside the car, and just let Maurice go at it. They would position an actress at the stairs, she would walk up into view, and Mo would get out of his car and go to her, pretty much as it had happened a year or so earlier.
LeLouche had gotten a new 16mm camera, the NPR, from Eclair, a French motion picture camera manufacturer, and, on a Saturday morning in August he and his cinematographer mounted it inside Mo’s 1965 Ferrari. The camera would hold 400 feet, 130 meters, of film, roughly 11 minutes worth of sound film at European sound-recording speed, 25fps, (compared to US 24fps, making the film look slightly slower on US projectors!) LeLouche told Trintignant to turn on the camera as he emerged from the underground roadway along the Seine at FDR Boulevard. They started just after dawn, about 4am. According to what Trintignant told LeLouche, he had just shifted into third gear as he started up the tunnel ramp and then he switched the camera on.
He hit more than 150 miles per hour on the Champs Elysses, blowing through red lights. The scene in which the car skids, starts one direction and heads another is because Trintigant momentarily forgot where he was and which road he was to take. He did take a one-way street the wrong way, but he recalled having done that the year before, and he was very surprised to encounter a trash truck in the pre-dawn Saturday side street which did not happen in his original run on a Sunday morning when trash collectors were off.
The running time is 9 minutes 40 seconds, or something like that. They did it in one take, one time, only. Mo did some runs at legal speeds during the days before to refresh his memory of the route, and to plan his run. But it was impossible to follow his actual route so these really were no kind of rehearsal. That’s what LeLouche said made it all so exciting. It was completely an illegal run because LeLouche knew it was easier to apologize than to obtain permission. It almost was done as a bet to see if Mo could do it again, this time with a camera in the car.
LeLouche mentioned nothing to me about being arrested. In fact, I think he continued producing films throughout that entire time these other “authorities” are talking about. I first saw the film in 1969, then again in 1972, and about once a year or so through the 1970s. It was a huge cult classic among car wackos. It only was available in black-and-white and it cost $300 to rent it for one showing or a dozen. I know this, because I wrote one of the rental checks for a Ferrari club chapter dinner meeting in the late 1970s. (A small “foreign film” distributor here in Santa Monica handled the film in the U.S. and it was pretty easy to rent. They listed it under cultural films, calling it a Paris Travelogue. I’m not kidding.) So as a result, the hosts of the car clubs often would rerun it several times during an evening. It took until shortly after the 1986 Cannes Film festival for the film to become more widely available, first on VHS, and later on DVD. I won’t say my conversation with LeLouche led to that, but it did become more widely available in the late 1980s.
So, maybe now, hust think of it as an action-adventure love story and you may enjoy it more…?
Ironically, Nissan’s ad agency used Rendezvous to inspire a fabulously costly (and much less enjoyable) 350Z commercial shot in Prague about three years ago. But many of the same cues, the old lady, the blown red lights, the trash truck, the wrong-way street, all are there, in an homage to Claude’s homage to l’amour, toujour l’amour.
Less assholish, once you know the story? love, dad