Paris Aims at Luring International Shoots With New Open-Air Backlot

Bringing Hollywood magic closer to the Seine, the long-awaited TSF Paris Backlot officially opened this week, inaugurating an outdoor cityscape built to scale, staged as a standing, permanent set 38 miles east of the real urban center.

Budgeted at €98 million ($107.6 million) and benefiting from $15.8 million in public support as part of the France 2030 infrastructure and modernization plan, the full Backlot 77 project is part of a broader, industry-wide initiative to lure international productions.

On site to inaugurate the Paris Backlot, French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati echoed this growing need for production facilities, pointing towards French Oscar submission “Emilia Pérez” as an example of a film that used studio space to imagine an entirely different world, while Kleindienst shared in that passion as he beamed that Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” forged an hallucinatory vision of Los Angeles entirely from another TSF studio just of outside of Paris.

Spread out over 3.7 acres, the ersatz Paris built at Backlot 77 makes for an uncanny and compressed version of the City of Light, with 57 facades and five interconnected streets that run the gamut from Haussmannian to more contemporary architectural styles. But for the conspicuous absence of cigarette butts littering the ground, one could easily mistake the detailed recreation for the real McCoy  — though, per the TSF brass, the set can be glammed up or grimed down from production to production.

“The backlot can suit a thousand and one purposes, depending on the script,” says TSF set designer Johann George. “Filmmakers can appropriate the space to their needs, taking over a full boulevard or simply using the space between storefronts, which would be more challenging to pull off in Paris without blocking traffic and compensating local business owners.”

Indeed, built for practicality as for stunts, the outdoor set is meant to alleviate the growing congestion issues facing urban shoots while affording filmmakers a more expansive playground.

To that end, the newly operational set might already be familiar to the 1 billion global viewers of this year’s Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, which used the Paris set – at the time still finishing construction – to stage a Jacques Tati-inspired chase sequence led by Zinedine Zidane.

At the same time, productions like “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” and the still-shooting “L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche,” with Claes Bang and Xavier Dolan, have already taken advantage of the exurban construction site even before the Paris set was finished.

As local filmmakers Dominik Moll (“The Night of the 12th”) and Xavier Giannoli (“Lost Illusions”) now eye the finished set for upcoming projects, international productions have also taken notice, with negotiations still ongoing between TSF and unnamed U.S.-based outfit. Meanwhile, construction will continue on the wider TSF Backlot 77 project, as the Gallic production services provider looks to bolster the full 74-acre site with twelve additional soundstages within the next few years.

“We’re [on the cusp] of a much greater acceleration,” says TSF strategy and development director Laurent Kleindienst. “And this global acceleration is saturating production sites. Most of the world’s sites are very, very busy, so we must develop our industrial infrastructure to bring those projects here.”