Visit to the bowels of Luc Besson’s Subway

In 1984, Luc Besson made the Paris metro a new cinematic territory. While France 5 rebroadcasts it this evening, return to the depths to see if the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the long corridors…

It’s 5 o’clock, Paris is not yet awake. The switch to summer time has disrupted the clocks and numbed minds. It’s still dark. Boulevard Voltaire, a rat runs across a depopulated bitumen. Place de la Nation. A gaping hole. RATP metal stairs. Underground, the vibrations of the first metro trains pierce a heavy silence. The abundant lighting abolishes the boundary between day and night. Here and there, figures lying on the ground are curled up in sleeping bags. On the walls, advertising posters display vain smiles. As for the users, few in number, they look like puppets lost in a space-time that they no longer control. Here a young girl, with peroxide blonde hair, has a vague look and an uncertain gait. She jumps to hit a panel which makes a disappointing noise. It continues on its way until it becomes a tiny dot devoured by the immense perspective of a corridor with faded colors.

The ceiling is in tatters and leaves “stalactites” hanging, as some agents jokingly call them. Further on, four haggard teenagers let themselves be carried away by a treadmill. One put his cell phone on speaker which spit out saturated music. None of them bother to keep time. More strength. Last stage of a journey after a moonless night. On the RER platform at Nation station, a train arrives at full speed. A few solitary, scattered souls emerge from their torpor and head towards doors as automatic as their movements. Line A direction Saint-Germain en Laye. Alarm. Noise of doors. Gare de Lyon then Châtelet and finally Auber. DAWN! A cathedral. High vaulted ceilings, endless escalators that go in twos, threes or even fours, wide escalators, still closed shops placed one after the other, orange-tinted corridors, old school signage that instructs you to keep your guard up. RIGHT…

This is where Luc Besson and his team spent most of their sleepless nights during the summer of 1984, for the production of Subway, the first fiction to consider the interior of the Parisian metro as a dramatic territory in its own right. From 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., taking advantage of public closing times. Several weeks of filming in the lair of the human beast. Away from sunlight. Christophe Lambert yellow hair tousled Sting style, Isabelle Adjani with an Iroquois hair, Michel Galabru excited behind his control screens, Richard Bohringer and his basket of flowers, Jean-Hughes Anglade on wheels… Its only mystery and I like It sings Arthur Simms. Eric Serra on bass, Jean Reno on drums. All around, an underground world which offers itself to them and soon to us, incredulous spectators of the 80s. This endless place, surveyed so many times, without apparent charm, unloved, suddenly reveals a mystery and an unprecedented expressiveness. A bizarre, neon-lit beauty. To return to where everything happened more than thirty years ago, and what’s more at this ungodly hour when no one really dares to venture, is to enter the house of one’s childhood, feverishly waiting for the ghosts of the past to occupy space again. Yet this morning, the walls remain desperately silent even if they say something.

A WILD FILM

Luc Besson in the metro at the dawn of the eighties, it’s Alice in Wonderland which falls into the unknown. The filmmaker – a plump twenty-something – himself recounts in a souvenir book the discovery of this secret world: “One evening I see a door half open on a platform. It is written: “Forbidden to the public”. I slip inside (…) What I discover little by little is mind-blowing. Totally unknown stations, with platforms, in the middle of Paris. Vacuum trains. Rooms overlooking tracks, in the middle of tunnels. Corridors where you can see, side by side, twenty completely melted candles. Farther from cardboard houses (…) A new and parallel world, right under my nose. There is life underground…

“And therefore a film to make. When he embarks on the adventureSubway Besson then only has one feature film to his credit – The last fight– a wordless curiosity against the backdrop of an apocalypse made with two francs six cents and a few debts. He now has the gleaming Gaumont rolling with him. To write his fiction he “wandered for six months, in forbidden corridors

” and observed the habits and customs of a rogue fauna living away from the world. In front of the RATP bosses, initially reluctant to let this teenager have fun in their garden, he passed over in silence the the most violent scenes. Didier Grousset, assistant director on Subwayreached by telephone, remembers the atmosphere very well: “Luc especially didn’t want the real script lying around on the set for fear of being removed by the metro agents. In any case, he had installed the cult of secrecy from the start. He really wanted to be the first to make a film entirely in the metro and was afraid of being overtaken. So I had learned the sequences by heart. The one where a driver is supposed to be robbed, for example, was shot in a completely wild way with a small crew. We pretended we had to make trivial plans and we went for it. It would be impossible to do again today! The same evening, while I was returning from filming, alone in a train, I met two guys who wanted to pick my pockets. I opened my leather without realizing that I still had the guns from the fake robbery on me. The guys ran off quickly.

“If a large part of the filming took place in the studio with sets created by the legendary Alexandre Trauner recreating the world “forbidden to the public”, the real metro is there without makeup. Or almost : “For the finale with the concert, we set up a stage in the hall of Auber station. The production had broadcast messages on the radio asking listeners to come and make up the numbers. In the evening, we had around 400 people. Luc was mainly doing close-ups on Isabelle Adjani’s steady cam and our audience started to get tired of hanging around for nothing. I then asked the officers to close the doors to prevent them from leaving. We finished around 5 a.m. with people tired but ultimately happy pretending to move their heads and raise their arms in the air…

“

METAL RESISTS BETTER

This Sunday March 25 at dawn, no one raises their arms in the hall of the Auber station. Shops with lowered blinds have transformed the square into a shopping center. To rediscover the spirit of the past, you must agree to plunge into this vast labyrinth which inevitably ends on a platform. Or listen to Jean-Michel Leblanc, RATP heritage manager:” The aesthetic of Besson’s film is linked to the construction of the RER at the end of the seventies. The arrival of these trains which serve Paris and its surrounding area has changed the appearance of the metro. New, gigantic architectures have appeared with work on bright colors and light. Very visible signage has also been placed to guide the user, such as numerous arrows indicating the different directions. It was also a way to break up the lines of escape in these long corridors. In 1984, when Luc Besson filmedSubway, the metro therefore represents modernity. We even see fashion magazines organizing shootings there.

.”At Auber station, a facelift project is currently underway. And in fact, everything here seems a little tired, worn. Black marks scar the walls with its small mosaic squares of a no longer truly immaculate white. As for seventies orange, it no longer reflects the same energy that saw it born. The gray of passing time, it is well known, dirties utopias. Metal resists better: “The large escalators also arrived at that time, continues Jean-Michel Leblanc. Real waterfalls that pour down streams of travelers. When I see Subway again, it’s especially these vertical descents that stand out to me. They energize the space. The man on the roller skating down the ramp between two staircases has surely given some ideas

.”Anyone today who would like to pay homage to the character played by Jean-Hughes Anglade would, however, very quickly be stopped by an advertising billboard or a piece of protruding jail. The clock is ticking, and so are the metro barriers. It’s daylight outside. Life resumes its more or less hectic course. The long corridors fill with anonymous silhouettes. The ghosts have taken refuge behind the forbidden doors. During his nocturnal wanderings, the young Luc Besson remembers having encountered in a room overlooking the rails “five inhabitants of the night; half tramps, half drug addicts

” and asked them if they sometimes came to the surface. “What surface?” he was told.