French Kicks
Gallic actioner 'District B13' showcases the martial-arts prowess of its leads
By Andy Klein
Commercial French action films are relative rarities nowadays, and nearly all of those that make it to the U.S. have some connection to filmmaker Luc Besson - director of The Fifth Element and The Professional, producer of The Transporter, Jet Li's Unleashed, and now District B13, the most exciting martial-arts-style movie since the Thai production Ong-Bak (whose Western release also came through Besson).
District B13 was directed by newcomer Pierre Morel, who has been camera operator for several Besson films. "I wanted to direct when I got out of film school," Morel tells me during a recent L.A. appearance with the movie's stars. "But I was so busy working in the camera department, I just forgot that. It was dormant until Luc asked, 'Do you wanna do a movie?' And that just woke me up. Well, yeah!"
With cowriter Bibi Naceri (who also plays the main villain), Besson built a serviceable, if not highly original, story to accommodate two unknowns he had brought together. Cyril Raffaelli was already an accomplished stunt man and martial-arts fight choreographer; he had worked on about 60 movies before, his most significant part being the final fight with Jet Li in Kiss of the Dragon. David Belle - whose most visible role had been the policeman in the climactic traffic accident scene in Brian de Palma's Femme Fatale - was the developer of Parkour, a combination of running, jumping, and climbing designed to negotiate urban landscapes. Picture the long foot chase in Tony Jaa's Ong-Bak or in nearly any Jackie Chan film, and you'll have a rough idea of what Parkour looks like.
Besson saw Belle in a documentary and, without a feature initially in mind, thought it might be interesting to bring him together with Raffaelli. The result was beyond anything he expected. "We instantly got on," Raffaelli says, "and became close friends. I was on my way to Thailand, and David ended up going with me, and we started training together." When Besson saw the chemistry between them, he started to write a script for them. "We had been friends for about three years before the film got made."
"The idea of the story," Morel says, "was to give us the opportunity to squeeze a lot of their skills into one film and show a lot of what they can do that no one else can."
The movie is set in the near future, when certain tough Paris neighborhoods are walled off to protect genteel society from their denizens. David plays Leïto, the charismatic neighborhood good guy, who constantly runs afoul of local mob boss Taha (Naceri). An attempt to free Leïto's sister, Lola (memorable newcomer Dany Verissimo), from Naha's clutches backfires, and Leïto finds himself in prison, while Taha gets Lola hooked on drugs and keeps her literally on a leash, as his personal pet.
A standard hijacking puts a new kind of kind of super-bomb in Taha's hands; unfortunately, he doesn't know that it's been triggered to go off in 24 hours. Tough cop Damien (Raffaelli) needs a guide to the forbidden zone and is forced to team up with Leïto to find the bomb, defuse it, and rescue Lola in the process.
Chases and fights ensue. Lots of them.
"In some cases, the original script just said 'There is a chase' and, in others, included more specific indications of the action," Morel explains, with the rest of the action developed before actual shooting. "It was what I call a living storyboard ... a video storyboard. Once we knew where the action's going to take place, and we had little bits and pieces of action all stuck together, we rehearsed on a stage and shot it on video to find the right angles, and then we edited it the way you would edit the real thing ... . It's much more helpful for everybody than a [drawn] storyboard, because a storyboard is always fake. You can never match it. We also used this a lot to improve safety, because that was a major concern all through the shoot."
Working out the "little bits and pieces of action" was collaborative, with Raffaelli at the center. "Even before the rehearsals," Raffaelli tells me, "like two months before the beginning of the shoot, all the scenes were already written and on paper. But David was also free to do his own thing." Morel gives the example of an impressive bit of shtick early in the film, when Belle propels himself, feet first, through a narrow transom window over a door. "In the original script, the idea was to escape from a corridor through a window ... . Cyril knew what David could do in terms of jumping, so he had that idea of making it through a smaller window. As we rehearsed it, we just kept making it smaller and smaller, until David said it was the minimum space he needed."
Raffaelli adds, "It worked out well, because I didn't want to stick stuff in for David just to show what he can do and impress everyone at the expense of logic. The tiny size made it more logical: He went through that little space, and none of the chasers could follow him."
Unlike directors who instruct the cameraman to undercrank to make the fights look faster, Morel had to shoot a lot of the action in high speed and slow it down later, because when "you see it for real, it's just too fast for people to figure out what's going on."
The film has done well around the world - "It was phenomenal in the [United Arab] Emirates," Morel claims in astonishment. The U.S. is one of the last countries it's opening in - and there have been the usual expressions of interest from Hollywood. "I've had lots of contacts with major studios, because they like the pace and the look of the film," Morel says. "But I have to make sure they fully understand that this was possible because of those two guys, because of their techniques, and that we cannot do exactly the same thing with the Hollywood way of shooting movies. They would just have Brad Pitt for the closeup and then substitute the stunt man; I can adapt to that, of course, but it's really a different way of shooting. You'd lose all the energy and freshness.
"The audience cannot be fooled anymore," he continues. "They know that the things are fake, they're CGI, and they're craving something more real. If productions are ready to do that kind of thing here, I'll be glad, but I don't think they could risk it."
The influence of Jackie Chan is obvious in District B13. When I ask the actors if they've seen his films, they both laugh and speak at once. "We've seen all of them. Even the ones that don't exist, that he hasn't done yet ... he's the No. 1 reference for what we do. He's always able to add that little thing that's going to make a difference, coming up with new great ideas ... and on top of that he's an actor, he does stunts, director, producer ... just everything."
When I ask if Chan has seen their film, their reaction is more uproarious, essentially (roughly translating from the French): "If only ... " and "In our dreams!"
"We can only wish," Raffaelli says. "If you hear, let us know."Published: 05/25/2006
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