08 June 2009
Fast is hard, in Paris
On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris early in the morning. The film was limited, for technical reasons, to ten minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about nine minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground. Until now.
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4 comments:
Restored and remastered on DVD, it is available at http://www.dvdsource.co.uk/dvd_13010517, for example.
There has been lots of speculation over the years about who the driver was and what kind of car it was. After years of silence, the filmmaker eventually admitted that he was the driver and the car was a Mercedes sedan with two other people on board. Check his website at http://www.lesfilms13.com/dea_a_z/envrac/lettre-r/rendezvous.htm. It's in French, but his story is there.
Wasn't a Ferrari. Years later Lelouch filmed a short documentary admitting that the car was his '78Mercedes 6.9 driven by an F1 driver friend and showing how he rigged the camera and dubbed the film. I have a euro 6.9 and I freak out unsuspecting boy racer passengers when I When I thrash the thing through country roads at 100 MPH+. It's the ultimate German goombah getaway car.
How could it be a '78 Mercedes if the film was shot in August '76? Check the director's website as listed in my last comment.
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