It is late morning on Thursday, 13 May 1999. Being Ascension Day it is a holiday in France. There I am, pleasantly tired at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, just outside Paris, disembarking from a comfortable flight from Colombo.
Hitting me first as it has always done, is the aroma of hot croissants and steaming espresso which assail me from the airport restaurants and cafés. I inhale deeply. It is nostalgic and brings back memories of my every disembarkation in Paris. And then I get lost in the maze for the next quarter of an hour. That’s another ritual.
Formalities completed and comfortably settled in my hotel room at the rue de la Roquette near the Bastille Opera House (fabulous area), I head for the Société CIFAP (Centre International de Formation Audiovisuel et de Production) at Montreuil at the edge of Paris. This is where the members of the Bonsoir team have been trained over time.
I have come to CIFAP to follow an advanced training course in audiovisual techniques. Television production, to simplify the jargon.
“So what do you want to do for your final production?”
“Montmartre of course,” I reply. Why Montmartre ? Because of all the places in Paris, this is the area I love most, possibly because of its microcosmic situation of being a “village” within the city of Paris which makes good stuff for a documentary.
Montmartre can mean many different things to many different people and so my big problem was what to leave out, what to put in where, in what order etc. How could I do justice to my subject within a half hour programme when it really should have been double the length?
That fortnight’s brainstorming with Roland Carrière was excruciating and mind boggling. How many times have we visited Montmartre, walked along its streets in the sun and rain, checked different light conditions, worked out camera angles, recorded natural sound. This was all very tiring yet very absorbing too.
In the middle of all this, public transport in Paris decides to go on strike for two days. One of its employees had died after being “attacked by a dark skinned foreigner” in an underground metro station. Parisians took their cars and bicycles out. Those who had neither, hitched rides. Having neither at my disposal, I thought I could hitch a ride too. But no one ever stopped for me. It was then that I realised that I too was a “dark skinned foreigner”! I had to settle for walking one full hour up and down, and happily discovered more nooks and corners of Paris in the process.
Now to the actual filming itself. This was when I had to work with television journalist Laurent Tastet, a young man with loads of energy and enthusiasm. We clicked instantly and got on like a house on fire.
For two long weeks the both of us literally pitched tents in Montmartre. This was a hands-on experience. How many times have we had baguette sandwiches for lunch sitting on the steps behind Montmartre, discussing the project, and then when the weather turned, how many innumerable cups of espresso or café-au-lait have we had in those little cafés that dot this little village in the city?
May sound surprising but being a Frenchman himself, he said that he learnt a lot about this area, simply by working on my project. Felt good.
Every production has its memorable and unforgettable moments. This had several. A memorable moment was filming in the 18th Century Cabaret du Lapin Agile, a very old and famous music hall of an era gone by. Every evening as the sun goes down this charming little music hall comes alive with songs from old Montmartre and old Paris. It still retains its olde-world charm to this day and is classified as the “Conservatoire of Montmartre Cabarets”. A must-visit venue for anyone going to Montmartre!
The other was the unforgettable experience – night filming outside the Moulin Rouge at Place Blanche which is also Paris’ red light district with its assortment of pretty, pouting, painted sex workers. Laurent had to be very, very careful not to get them into our frame for two cardinal reasons – we did not want their wrath upon our cameras and us, AND, those shots could never have been shown on Bonsoir in Sri Lanka!
