🎧 Pas de Deux with Paris: The Art of Filming 'Étoile'
The ballet comedy's production designer, director of photography and choreographer share the obstacles and 'esprit' of filming in France
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“If we can’t go to Paris and find locations to shoot in, we should all be fired,” Bill Groom, the production designer on Étoile, told the crowd at The Ankler’s Art & Crafts Live event on May 8. “But we ended up building so much there, because Paris is a really difficult place to shoot.”
Pity the cast and crew of Prime Video’s comedy, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino and set in the rarefied world of professional ballet, which filmed for months on location in New York and the City of Light. Romantic as it sounds, the production was rife with creative, cultural and logistical challenges. Groom, along with director of photography M. David Mullen, ASC and choreographer Marguerite Derricks, shared how they tackled some of those challenges in a conversation moderated by production designer François Audouyon (A Complete Unknown) at the American Society of Cinematographers Clubhouse in L.A.
The process of casting the dancers — 20 professionals in each of the two cities, plus dozens more SAG-AFTRA dancers for the company class scenes — was “the hardest part” for Derricks, she said, as the goal was for virtually every one of them to seem like a star on stage and off. “Nobody was just a background extra,” said Derricks. Sherman-Palladino “felt that dancers moved differently when they were walking down the hallway,” Groom added, “and she wanted those to be real dancers.”
When it came to the show’s Paris setting, though, the creator-showrunner was less invested in pure vérité. “Paris is also a modern city,” Groom recalled reminding Sherman-Palladino as he researched and strategized. “Not my Paris,” she’d say. So the team went about shooting the city in as classical a manner as they could, all while dealing with the constraints of its robust tourist economy. “It was almost impossible to have Paris conform to our schedule,” Groom said. “We had to conform to Paris.”
Where in New York you can often apply for and get a shooting permit overnight, Mullen and his crew often wouldn’t hear back from Paris officials for weeks. And when he did, they were fiercely protective of the city’s storied architecture. Mullen said he found “the lightest crane ever made, a couple of hundred pounds” for a shoot on the Pont des Arts bridge. Mais non! “So we ended up building a wooden ramp for the steady cam to walk up and down to create a pseudo crane shot.”
But Paris couldn’t hide its charms. “I did an episode that was a date that Mishi (Taïs Vinolo) goes out on with a young man. . .and that whole episode was just lovely in terms of hopping around the city into cafes and nightclubs and the river Seine and the alleyways of the Latin quarter,” Mullen recalled. “It was like doing a little French movie.”
