Cannes, France: The dirty glamor and dazzling light have lured the Director of Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, and now Marseille is a setting for no less than three films at the Cannes Film Festival, including Matt Damon’s latest drama.
The second city of Mediterranean Raffish France has an iconic status in Hollywood as a setting for the film Thriller “French connection” in the 1970s.
Lately, a narrow alley that leads to its old port has been thick with a film crew.
As well as Netflix series “Marseille”, who played a city’s reputation for corruption and crime with Gerard Depardieu as a crooked mayor but charismatic, sandy film plants by young French directors have also thrown it back to spotlights.
“Stillwater”, the premier in Cannes on Thursday, has Damon as an American oil-Of-water worker trying to make his daughter out of prison because of the murder he claimed not committed.
The film was made by Tom McCarthy, which made the “Spotlight” Oscar winner and introduced the “Game of Thrones” Star Peter Dinklage to the world with a “station agent”.
It was not surprising that he had to turn on Marseille, William Benedetto said, who runs the cinema mythical city in the city.
“Marseille is the most American city in Europe.
The port, like New York, has become a jump for so many stories,” he told AFP.
Like Big Apple, Marseille is also a multicultural baby, an immigrant city with a large personality that heroes and criminals run at the end of the legality.
Netflix took the movies set by other Marseille, “Bac Nord”, even before it even aired in Cannes, precisely because it had the hard quality of the early Martin Scorese film.
This attracts a real life corruption scandal in the northern suburbs of the northern city where detectives are accused of stealing from the drug dealers they should use.
Also penetrating this tower block is a “good mother” by the director of the famous French actor Hafsia Herzi, who also opened in Cannes.
As a native of the city, Herzi has credentials to shoot there, but still have to negotiate with the locals before shooting.
Many legendary directors have been withdrawn to Marseille, including Hitchcock (“Rich and Strange”), Spielberg (“Catch me if you can”), and Alexander Corda, which makes a movie trilogy about the city.
And the number of films and shooting series has tripled in the last decade, according to local officials.
It’s good for the economy but it might be at risk for its reputation, because many plays on their stereotypes as “Kalashnikov City” are cruel and dangerous.
“Marseille is a city that refuses, the fight, which rebels, which doesn’t eat anything lying down, and the border side can sometimes end up as a caricature like in ‘Bac Nord’,” said Writer Vincent Thabourey.
But cliche has also given a former French colonial port as a global profile, he added.
It will get another encouragement from “Stillwater” which ends.
Damon said he took his own emotions as the father of girls to channel anger and frustration of Oklahoma Redneck abroad.
Characters “operate to all the problems you have when you have cultural language and barriers that Oklahoma Roughneck will have abroad”, Damon said in a recent interview.
Actors, of course, have a history in Marseille because it is a fisherman from the attractive city Jason Bourne who is not realized from the Mediterranean at the beginning of the Blockbuster franchise.
Trying to do justice to “the city as a complex like Marseille is a real challenge for the director”, said Thabourey, namely “why they continue to return”.