When a friend asked whether I had once seen some movie of a Ferrari racing through Paris, images I saw years ago flashed through my head and thus I dug this one up and even dug a little deeper …

It’s an August morning, 5:30-ish, 1978, Paris is starting to wake up and Claude Lelouch decides to create this crazy masterpiece. This <10 minute long movie has known great success on the big screen, reached cult status and is now even remastered for DVD. Of course this would be a rather boring post if you couldn’t actually see the movie, so here it is:

“le film que vous allez voir a été réalisé sans aucun trucage ni accéléré”
“the film you are about to watch was realised without any special effects nor accelerated”

Claude Lelouch was arrested after the first public showing of this movie, but was released shortly after, uncharged. He just told the police he wasn’t the driver of the car … and thus the rumors started. Suggested was Lelouch hired a professional formula1-driver, names called are those of the likes of Jacky Ickx, Jacques Laffitte and René Arnoux. None of these appear to be true though as Lelouch confessed in an interview given in 2006, he did drive the car himself.

Other things came to light as well. The car used for the movie wasn’t a Ferrari at all, although everyone seemed to believe the car used was Lelouch’s Ferrari 275GTB. In fact the car used was a Mercedes Benz 450SEL 6.9. The reason is simple … suspension. This car only has 3 shifts, 5 of them can be heard however, so the sound is still believed to be recorded from the 275GTB and dubbed over the original.

There is still discussion about the speed Lelouch traveled at. With the camera mounted low to the ground, of course everything seems to be going quite fast. Lelouch himself claims the top speed reached was somewhere between 230 and 240kph (around 145mph), while calculations made by independent groups show he never even topped 140kph (85mph), while yet another calculation suggests his top speed was around 220kph (136.7mph). Not that any of this is of real matter actually.

The route taken for those interested can be viewed here.

And to close things up, the 2006 interview (in French!) with the man himself:

Interesting links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%27%C3%A9tait_un_rendez-vous
http://www.lesfilms13.com/
http://www.lesfilms13.com/dea_a_z/news/news87.htm
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ezcV5kQFr9o - Fifth Gear decided to give it a try as well

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.