District B-13
A resolutely contemporary action film, DISTRICT B13 arose from a script penned by Luc Besson and is directed by Pierre Morel. Chief cinematographer of many feature pictures, Pierre Morel, who was scouting for a project, found himself at the controls of DISTRICT B13 in December 2003. The shoot was interrupted for six months after the star Cyril Raffaelli got hurt. "One day," he explains, "I happened to be in Luc's office and he told me, 'here, read this and tell me if you'd like to direct this film.' I spent the night reading the script and phoned him back the next morning. I told him I was really excited about it, but wondered if I'd be up to the task. He answered, 'don't start by being disagreeable!' (laughter). We commenced preparation in January 2004."

The first challenge of DISTRICT B13: the credibility of the fights and chases. Ever since Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior, the new reference in action/martial arts films, distributed by EuropaCorp, the bar has been set high. The casting of Leïto and Damien was therefore essential. David Belle, who was at the origin of Yamakasi and invented the concept of Parkour, a philosophy of action based on total mobility in an urban environment, was offered the part of Leïto. He has, moreover, many points in common with this character. To play Damien, the "untouchable" cop, the production company focused in on Cyril Raffaelli, specialist in precision stunts. He's been seen on screen in Taxi 2, Mortal Transfer, Mission Cleopatra and Kiss of the Dragon (where he plays Tchéky Karyo's sidekick). During their first meetings, Pierre Morel and Luc Besson quickly realized that they had come up with a dream pair. The film's preparation accelerated, for, much like the bomb in DISTRICT B13, the countdown had already begun. When the film's French theatrical release date was confirmed on November 10, 2004, the crew were still right in the middle of the shoot. Everything henceforth went very quickly. The first scenes to be shot were the comic sequences.

After dozens of hours of grueling rehearsals which pushed them all to their very limits, David and Cyril thus became Leïto and Damien. Part of the exterior locations were shot in the gloomy housing projects of Romania: there, it is easier to obtain authorization to do stunts on the concrete towers. As the shoot advanced, the stunts became more and more complicated. Without stuntmen, or rather with actors doing their own stunts. Never before seen in France since the golden days of Jean-Paul Belmondo! To capture the ultra rapid actions, Pierre Morel filmed most of the stunt scenes and choreographies with a special high-speed camera, recording 150 frames/second instead of just 24, enabling the audience to "discover with a little more comfort. You can really see what's happening. Even if, in the end, during editing, we barely slowed down things," explains Pierre Morel. The shoot became more and more complex with each passing day to wind up with the biggest action scenes, notably an incredible shootout/fight inside a clandestine casino. Here, there was no room for improvisation and the stunts, rehearsed a thousand times over, had to be reproduced to the very fraction of an inch.

Cyril Raffaelli: "It's extremely calculated, even if, when we shoot, there's always a certain freestyle aspect to it. During rehearsals, we never have access to actual shooting conditions. We don't know what the sets or lighting will be like. We try to be as near as possible to what things will be really like on D-Day. So, each time we come to the moment when 'Camera! Action!' is shouted out, we always feel a certain amount of stress and fear, because there's a whole crew waiting for the action to happen, so we don't necessarily get on with it exactly when we want to, but rather when we're asked to." A film at 1,000 miles an hour, DISTRICT B13 is nevertheless not some big, soulless machine, but rather a picture with a reasonable budget, carried along by a motivated crew. Morel: "We tried to make a film using as little technology as possible. It's more of a raw film, simple, old-fashioned and handmade."

INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR
PIERRE MOREL

How does one prepare a film like DISTRICT B13?
There were several challenges. The technical challenge was to be able to create spectacular and relatively dangerous things, and come up with the right places to do them and film them. The two leading characters must always be highlighted while in the very heart of the action. Outside the action scenes, there were the comic ones as well. So we worked a lot! It was a script studded with action sequences, a real plot and genuine scenes, not just guys banging each other over the head for an hour and a half. We took a long time to cast the actors, stuntmen and fighters surrounding them. As soon as everything was fully defined, they started to train. For several weeks, I had them all rehearse, one after the other, so that things would take place as well as possible.

Was Cyril Raffaelli the director of the fight scenes?
He was his own choreographer. Cyril suggested various choreographies and highly different fight sequences to us, and we did our utmost to adapt them into the script. They were prepared far ahead of time. They were surrounded by stuntmen, genuine martial arts fighters, specialists in kung-fu, ultimate fighters and top-level boxers. In the small world of fighters, they all more or less know each other. Cyril has a special background: he started in circus school before moving on to martial arts. Only after that did he become first a professional stuntman, then an actor. So he brought to the film a large number of people from many different fields.

The great precision of the scenes is really striking. Is it important to be rigorous?
Given the blows they exchange, if they're improvised, they'd really hurt each other. So, each blow was calibrated to the very fraction of an inch, both for the jumps and David's Parkour. We wanted to make these actions as realistic as possible, and tried not to fall back on the usual stunts that have been already seen a hundred times over.

In all the action scenes, was there one which was the most impressive or delicate?
The casino scene was a truly great moment: a non-stop series of fights for a full three or four minutes. Result: thirty-give corpses on the ground! It was a highly complicated sequence for it to hold up and not look like some MTV video. It was especially long as, to shoot that scene, we took six full days.

The rapper, MC Jean Gab'1, has a small part, his first screen appearance. What was the mood like working with him?
He's an adorable fellow, bursting with kindness. We wanted him to play the part of a bad guy. Even he didn't have a stand-in, and the two or three blows he took, he really took!

Do you think it's really a new trend for action films when the stuntman turns actor?
It's more than just a trend. The audience needs true heroes, not just actors who pretend. Action films are less and less based on special effects. Sportsmen and stuntmen are gradually becoming real stars. The realistic side pleases more and more audiences out for extreme sensations. Young Europeans are rather fascinated by what can be seen in the Chinese, Thai and Korean schools, where guys play their real roles.

Does the expression "suburban film" suit you?
I don't know what it means. DISTRICT B13 is first and foremost a pure action film which takes place in a suburb, set a few years into the future. The initial screenplay pitch was a "political fiction" about what the suburbs might be in a few years if we don't change things and make the wrong decisions.

Was there an enormous amount of post-production work on DISTRICT B13?
There were things in the script that don't exist in real life: the walls, barbed wire, surrounding bunkers… everything that we don't see for real. And, as well, a little masking out of everything that concerned safety: a small number of cables, a few mattresses, a handful of nets… In fact, there wasn't much post-production at all.

At what moment was the French release date decided on?
Halfway through the shoot. We start to film as of April and were handed the release date in June. The trailer's have been screened in theaters since August 15th and the film's slated for French release on November 10th. During the Cannes Film Market, there were huge posters everywhere when we hadn't even been shooting for more than a week!

How would you sum up the shoot of DISTRICT B13?
It was a marathon. We knew it was going to be complex, as there were lots of action scenes. It was a rather long shoot but with such energy we didn't even notice the time pass

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