Peugeot 403

One of the fun things about living in Paris is that inadvertently, at one point or another, chances are that someone will be making a film on your very street. This has happened to me several times already, and it all starts with a piece of paper tacked to your building's front door.

Last weekend I saw notices taped to the lamposts along my way home, informing residents of a shooting to take place on Tuesday involving a bunch of classic cars. So that morning, I went out with my sketchbook to see what I could draw.

I didn't want to miss out on anything (sometimes film crews can come and go before you know it - especially if they decide to film at night). So I headed out early, and had some time to draw just a few of the traffic cones before the cars arrived...

 

It was pretty cold that morning, and if you've been on a set, you'll know that they usually involve a lot of people standing around. So I started to draw some of the crew members standing around, but at this point they started turning into scribbles because my fingers had begun to freeze.

Then this Peugeot 403 turned up - and parked right in front of me! The crew were really nice, and told me that this car was going to remain stationary. It was basically there to cover up some road work that was going on at the same time - the traffic barriers around the hole were modern, and so they had decided to just hide the whole thing behind this car.

This was great news, because I could go inside and grab a coffee to warm up. Drawing cars is hard enough - never mind the frozen fingers!

 

Besides being difficult to draw, the other cars were driving around, making it pretty hard for me to get anything else down. After a while I needed to move around a bit, so I decided to scribble the back of one of the crew trucks and yes, the ubiquitous and inevitable traffic cone.

I lucked out again when the cast and crew parked the cars and went off for lunch. I figured they'd be back soon enough though, so rather than attempting a whole car I chose to concentrate on this taxi meter - which was getting a lot of comments from the older passers-by who were enjoying the shoot as much as I.

They were filming a French made-for-tv movie entitled "L'Escalier de fer". I have no idea when it will be broadcast, but if f you ever get the chance to see it, maybe you'll recognize the black and red taxi with the meter outside!