http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4110
Lizzy Davies in Paris
The Guardian
It was billed as the big-budget film that would bring hope and much-needed prosperity to one of Paris’s most notoriously troubled suburbs. But shooting of Luc Besson’s From Paris With Love, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2235 John Travolta, has been cancelled after 10 stunt cars were set alight during a night-time rampage.
Several scenes of the €38.5m (£30m) movie were due to be filmed in Les Bosquets de Montfermeil, a restive public housing estate in the north-east of the capital, which was one of the first areas to explode into violence during the riots of 2005. Following a string of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5722 attacks on Sunday night, however, Besson announced yesterday the project had been called off – possibly for good.
“We are deeply disappointed,” said the local mayor, Xavier Lemoine, explaining that Besson’s production company, EuropaCorp, had decided the risks to the crew and high-profile cast were too high.
Almost a hundred residents of Les Bosquets, a part of the suburbs that remains blighted with poverty, unemployment and criminality, had been recruited either as extras or as security guards. Besson, whose company was to pay the employees €100 a day, has spoken of his desire to mine the untapped talent of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2819 and try to draw the cultural spotlight to a part of the world usually overlooked.Moussba Harb, one of the recently hired extras, had taken a week off work for the filming, which had been due to start on Monday. The mother-of-four told Agence France-Presse she had been preparing a meal for 45 people since the weekend. “It’s a missed opportunity,” she said. “We wanted people to turn the page from the things that go on in Montfermeil.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/15/france