Host to ‘The Walking Dead’ and Olympics Opening Ceremony, France’s TSF Studios Inaugurates New Backlot Recreating City of Lights
variety.comBen Croll 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.
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