The directors take advantage of the holidays and the departure of the Parisians to invest the streets and certain buildings of the capital.

REPORTAGE

The weekend of August 15, the capital is idling ... except for the cinema. Days longer and sunny, deserted streets, Paris is invested by filmmakers at the height of summer.

"We have the opportunity to invest public places and project fiction spaces"

According to estimates by the Paris Cinema Mission, nearly 700 shooting days are planned for July and August of this year. Many films, said period, are welcomed.

For his film on the Second World War, the director Gabriel Le Bomin thus turns some sequences inside historic buildings in Paris. Facing the camera, Lambert Wilson embodies a determined Charles de Gaulle. It is hot under the period costumes, but according to the director, the season is ideal for filming in these places, emptied of their occupants.

"We have the opportunity to invest places that are public places and to project fiction spaces." We have been able to reconstitute in a mansion of the 7th district a burning house inside the courtyard. had the feeling of working as if we were at home, "he says at the microphone of Europe 1.

Fewer Parisians

But for other filmmakers, it's a whole street, or neighborhood that has to go back into the past. Michel Gomez, of the Paris Cinema Mission, receives this summer a lot of requests ... sometimes unusual.

"Hide pedestrian crosswalks, hide red lights, dress the streets with extras, horse cars." There are sometimes traffic and parking neutralization a little imposing, but as Parisians are less present, it's more easy to set up during these periods, "says Michel Gomez. The craziest request he has received this summer? Put horses at full gallop on a bridge, then in the streets of the center of Paris ...