France Tries to Lure Filmmakers

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/business/global/france-tries-to-lure-filmmakers.html

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PARIS — When Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones arrived in France recently for the shooting of “Malavita,” a new mobster movie, they did not have to stray far from the set. While Hollywood stars often shuttle between cramped trailers on movie lots and five-star hotels an hour away, the cast of “Malavita” was provided with luxury suites overlooking the studio.

The promoters of the newly opened Studios de Paris hope that French touches like these will give them an edge in a growing global competition to lure international film production and the millions of dollars it leaves behind for local businesses. Despite a troubled economy and an uncertain outlook for the media industry, a worldwide boom in studio-building is under way, with ambitious projects taking shape from the banks of the Seine to China.

Studios de Paris is part of a €180 million, or $230 million, project called Cité du Cinéma, which has transformed a formerly gritty part of the Paris suburb of Saint Denis. It is centered on a decommissioned and renovated power plant, which houses a film school, a movie studio with nine stages and the headquarters of EuropaCorp, one France’s biggest television and film producers.

Cité du Cinéma is the brainchild of Luc Besson, chairman of EuropaCorp, director of movies like “The Fifth Element” and producer of the current box office hit “Taken 2.” Mr. Besson’s plan dates to 1997, when he wanted to shoot “The Fifth Element” in France but could not find a facility big enough. Instead, he had to use Pinewood Studios in Britain.

“We built this site for French films but especially for the big American productions that generally go to Italy, to Luxembourg, to Switzerland or to England, but never to France, because we didn’t have the tools to accommodate them,” Mr. Besson said in an e-mail.

“I’ve worked a lot with American actors,” he added. “I know how the studios operate. We have the best technicians in the world, and now we have the most beautiful stages as well.”

While France has the most vibrant domestic movie industry in Europe, many of the hundreds of films shot in the country annually are small-scale, character-led productions, not the big-budget special-effects extravaganzas that are Hollywood’s specialty. It does not take much of a studio to shoot scenes of awkward family silences around the dinner table.

EuropaCorp is the exception to this rule, making English-language, blockbuster-style pictures that regularly generate half of their box office receipts in the United States. But France has struggled to attract free-spending Hollywood productions, even as Britain, Germany and other European countries draw ever more of these projects. Studios de Paris aims to close the gap.

With its giant former turbine hall and 9,500 square meters, or about 100,000 square feet, of sound stages, Cité du Cinéma, which was financed by a mix of public and private investment, is an impressive sight. Still, it is dwarfed by other European studio operations, like the Pinewood Studios Group, which has 34 stages in three complexes in Britain, and the Babelsberg studio near Berlin, which has 20 stages on a single site.

Britain has long been the biggest European recipient of Hollywood investment. James Bond movies like the new “Skyfall” are shot at Pinewood. Two years ago, one U.S. studio, Warner Brothers, acquired its own British studio, Leavesden, where the “Harry Potter” movies were made, and pumped more than $150 million into renovating it.

Pinewood wants to get even bigger. The company that runs it plans an expansion that would double its studio capacity, though its ambitions were scaled back after the government rejected a previous proposal that would have included the construction of 1,400 homes.

Babelsberg, too, attracts substantial Hollywood investment and big international productions like “Anonymous,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “The Reader” and “The Pianist,” which were all shot there in recent years.

Elsewhere, Canada has long been a popular destination for Hollywood producers. In Central and Eastern Europe, where costs are lower, there has been substantial investment in production facilities. In China, a media tycoon, Bruno Wu, is building an enormous film complex near the city of Tianjin, with the aim of attracting Hollywood co-productions.

Studio operators say demand for space is rising because movie production remains relatively robust and because the turbulence in the media business has an upside. With video platforms proliferating, whether iPads and other hand-held devices or giant IMAX movie theaters, there is a growing need for original content.

Subsidies are another lure. European governments have long used public money, either directly or indirectly through tax breaks and other incentives, to support local film production; in recent years they have gotten ever more generous about extending these to international, English-language shoots. Even France, long seen as wary of Hollywood’s incursions into French culture, established a tax break for foreign film production about two years ago.

The French rebate is currently capped at €4 million a film. That is not enough to make much of a difference for the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, with their nine-figure budgets — the kinds of films that Studios de Paris wants to attract. So production executives are lobbying for a bigger tax incentive.

Whether they will get it is unclear. Government finances in France are strained, and the European Commission is looking into film subsidies across the European Union amid concerns that member states might bend over too far in their effort to attract Hollywood.

David Hancock, an analyst at Screen Digest, a research firm, said the Paris studio might have better luck attracting midsize films, including pan-European co-productions.

“I’m not dismissing it, but they do face quite a bit of competition from other locations,” he said.

Christophe Lambert, the chief executive of EuropaCorp, said France had other advantages. While labor costs are high, his studio has a reputation for cost-effectiveness.

“Taken 2,” for example, was made on a budget of about $45 million — less than half what a similar thriller might cost if made in Hollywood. Through the end of October, the film had taken in nearly $300 million globally.

Fresh from shooting “Malavita,” EuropaCorp plans to begin work on an action film starring Kevin Costner, at Studios de Paris in December. Both films are being made with a Hollywood partner, Relativity Media.

“In Hollywood, it’s simple,” Mr. Lambert said. “If you deliver, they trust you. If you don’t they don’t. At the end of the day, when we invest €1, it looks like €2 or €3 on the screen.”