Don’t Try This at Home Video

Posted on November 14, 2005 by glasscastle

Ever want to drive a really cool car
really, really fast? Ever want to break every traffic law in the book,
risk your own life and that of others, and force frantic Frenchmen and
women flee your passage? Who hasn’t?

We offer, for your perusal, this short film. The back
story is:

This is a pretty incredible 9 1/2 min. of realtime
film–aside from the danger to life and limb. I got this clip from
someone who said
that a French filmmaker hired a formula 1 driver to race an F1 car
across Paris with a camera mounted to the front. The driver then was
promptly arrested by
Paris police.

A friend who lives in Paris then sent me a link to some info on the
filmmaker, Claude Lelouch de Jean-Philippe Chatrier. If your French
is good, you
can read (second link) about how the filmmaker says he drove the car
himself, staked out the route and communicated by radio with a team
of spotters to reduce the risks of an accident. The woman at the end
is
the mother of his child. He also says that the police initially merely
took his drivers license away but then promptly returned it as the
cop’s kids liked the film so much (but how would they have seen it?).
He says
he filmed at 5:30am in August, presumably a Sunday, but why are the
garbage trucks out? The title sequence (for you non-francophones) states
that
the film was not edited ("faked") or sped up.

Definitely worth 9 minutes of your time. Somehow the single camera single shot format makes it seem much more real than any movie car chase we have seen…

(Gracias, John D.)

link to video

link to article (in French)
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3 Responses to Don’t Try This at Home Video

  1. C. Herrera says:
    November 17, 2005 at 4:03 pm

    The film follows in the tradition of a famous internet film called “Getaway in Stockholm” that shows a Porsche 911 escaping from Police in Stockholm, Sweden. Getaway, and the subsequent follow-ons, spawned a host of imitators in other cities and indeed, marketing materials (I believe Audi released a DVD showing their cars zipping through parts of Vienna.)

    As to whether the car in this film is indeed a F1 car, I doubt it — the suspension seems very forgiving considering much of the time the car is on cobblestones.

  2. C. Herrera says:
    November 17, 2005 at 4:03 pm

    The film follows in the tradition of a famous internet film called “Getaway in Stockholm” that shows a Porsche 911 escaping from Police in Stockholm, Sweden. Getaway, and the subsequent follow-ons, spawned a host of imitators in other cities and indeed, marketing materials (I believe Audi released a DVD showing their cars zipping through parts of Vienna.)

    As to whether the car in this film is indeed a F1 car, I doubt it — the suspension seems very forgiving considering much of the time the car is on cobblestones.

  3. Gary says:
    June 26, 2010 at 3:17 am

    I have been to these areas before on trips to Europe. The areas seem rather open for the normal traffic and pedestrian flow that normally is encountered. Just curious as to the time of day that it is being filmed…or the early morning.

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