Michael Mason Bastille Day

Michael Mason Bastille Day

Cast: Kelly Reilly, Idris Elba, Charlotte Le Bon, Richard Madden
Directors: James Watkins, Jill Gage
Genre: Action
Running Time: 90 minutes

Synopsis: Michael Mason is an American pickpocket living in Paris who finds himself hunted by the CIA when he steals a bag that contains more than just a wallet. Sean Briar, the field agent on the case, soon realises that Michael is just a pawn in a much bigger game and is also his best asset to uncover a large-scale conspiracy.

Going against commands, Briar recruits Michael to use his expert pickpocketing skills to help quickly track down the source of the corruption. As a 24hr thrill ride ensues, the unlikely duo discover they are both targets and must rely upon each other in order to take down a common enemy.

Bastille Day
Release Date: May 12th, 2016

About The Production

A blistering action thriller set in the French capital, Paris, Bastille Day is a story of an unlikely pair – a reckless CIA agent and a brilliant pickpocket – who must work together to uncover and take down a conspiracy.

Michael Mason (Richard Madden, Game Of Thrones) is an American pickpocket living in Paris who finds himself in the hands of the CIA when he steals a bag that contains more than just a wallet. Sean Briar (Idris Elba, -Luther', Prometheus), the field agent on the case, soon realizes that Michael is just a pawn in a much bigger game and is also his best asset to uncover a large-scale criminal conspiracy.

Going against commands, Briar recruits Michael to use his expert pickpocketing skills to help quickly track down the source of the corruption. As a 24hr thrill ride ensues, the unlikely duo discovers they are both targets and must rely upon each other in order to take down a common enemy.

The film was shot in Paris and London in autumn 2014 for 9 weeks.

About The Film

'The original idea at the time when Andrew Baldwin first shared his inspiration for this movie was to create a movie that combined the taut action of the Bourne movies with the characterrich experiences of watching movies like Frantic and even The French Connection.

We believed that a movie that honoured those iconic films would be commercially viable and be creatively exciting. Andrew's underlying curiosity was to understand what these characters might be doing in Paris and to examine their motives and choices under intense pressure, but still take us on a thrill ride through a city that we all love." says producers David Kanter and Bard Dorros. Anonymous Content commissioned Baldwin to write a script based upon his original idea and it became the basis for Bastille Day.

In 2012, David Kanter and Bard Dorros approached long-time friend Philippe Rousselet, chief executive officer of Paris-based Vendome Pictures, confident that the screenplay, with its strong French and American themes, would appeal to the French producer. 'They responded within two or three days and said let's do this," says David Kanter.

It was the film's combination of high-octane action, mismatched central relationship and sly social engagement that appealed to director James Watkins, the British filmmaker who first came to international attention with his grippingly taut thriller Eden Lake about a couple whose romantic trip to the countryside goes terrifyingly wrong.

-Hitchcock is my hero and Bastille Day had a classic Hitchcockian thriller set-up in that it's about the wrong man being in the wrong place at the wrong time – Michael, the pickpocket, who picks the wrong pocket and is the catalyst for a sequence of events that get increasingly out of hand. I thought this harked back to the classic noir-ish thriller of the past such as Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street."

My last film [The Woman In Black] was all about going as slow as I dare. Here I saw an opportunity to tell a story at breathless, breakneck pace. The story recalled the muscular 70s thrillers that I love: shot on the streets, with new lighter handheld cameras, giving the action a raw edge. I wanted to make a film that had the lean and mean quality of tension of Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin's New York.

Briar's character - uncompromising, brutal, reckless – had shades of Popeye Doyle, Dirty Harry or Walker from John Boorman's Point Blank. The notion of Idris Elba playing this role was irresistible to me. His combustible relationship with the streetwise Michael struck me immediately as the beating heart of the film and I liked the opportunities this relationship gave for lighter moments. It reminded me of the gruff, salty humour of early Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood collaborations or classics like Midnight Run and 48 Hours where the tone shift gears from gritty action to more playful moments whilst never breaking character.'

The twisting and turning nature of the three protagonists' relationship was a key element for Watkins. 'Michael, Zoe and Briar are all very ambivalent, morally ambiguous characters," he explains." Zoe was going to plant a bomb; Briar's methodology is questionable - he's violent and he's aggressive; and Michael is, to use Briar's words, 'a parasite" who steals bags and watches and wallets. They're all troubled, and sometimes morally troubled, but despite that, they are likeable. They're not bad people, they're just complicated."

David Kanter also points out that it's the way the characters have been developed that makes Bastille Day special. The characters are not conventional heroes; rather, they are all flawed and forced by circumstance to discover who they really are. One key to the success of the film is that they are believable and realistic. 'It feels like a movie from the 1970s, where the characters are all carrying something heavy in their psyches. They are thrown together by fate and come to realise that the bombing isn't what it appears to be, so they are forced to depend on each other."

James Watkins also spoke to the fact that Bastille Day tries to explore more than just narrative thrills: -We tried to make a Friday night ride, a rip-snorting entertainment for people at the end of a long week. But that doesn't mean you can't smuggle things in or glance at current social anxieties - Captain Phillips is a really interesting example of an incredibly tense piece of entertainment that also manages to make some points about a number of social issues including globalisation and inequality without being boring or polemical. I'm interested in films that can do that, that have an elevated quality to the thrill so it's not just guys running around with guns. Bastille Day is a story with buried layers - personal, action, and geopolitical - and, even though it's a very, very fast paced action thriller, it does touch on the anger that a lot of people have in terms of feeling disenfranchised from the political process. You see it in London, you see it in Paris, and it is a big theme in the plot because the bad guys exploit it. The theme of deception and trust between the characters and the two countries - France and the US - and how the characters engage with that was very interesting. As Michael demonstrates to Briar, we live in a world of sleight-of-hand where -it's all about the distraction…'

Watkins' commitment to the film certainly impressed the producers. 'We were big fans of Eden Lake and The Woman in Black," says David Kanter. 'He responded very intelligently to the screenplay and during the filming, he was in command of every part of the movie, he understood what he wanted and had a very good rapport with the actors. He set out to create something inspired and beautiful and he did just that."

The Cast
Taking the lead is Idris Elba as Sean Briar, the CIA operative who has been confined to a desk job in Paris after a mission in the Middle East went wrong.

The filmmakers were looking for 'a combination of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood," says David Kanter. 'We wanted an actor with a moral code that feels organic to who they are. Somebody who projects a strong no bullshit vibe but is a real person underneath all that; someone who could carry the pain. There was a lot of discussion about how clearly we define Briar's past. I think we strike a balance in our storytelling about Briar clearly having been through something specific, without articulating it to a great extent. He had to be someone who you really believed would take matters into his own hands and was competent enough to sort it out. Idris is one of the few actors who has all those qualities and this was a film which would allow him to show them. He really had a sense of who this man is and who he could be. When a movie star responds from an emotional place, when it's a real connection with the material, you'd be a fool not to go on that journey with him."

James Watkins shared his enthusiasm to have Idris cast as Agent Sean Briar. 'Briar is a CIA agent that has been out in the field for a long time but he's been demoted and sent to Paris to cool off after an assignment in the Middle East went wrong, leaving him with blood on his hands," says director James Watkins. 'He really doesn't like being amongst these desk-jockeys and is desperate to get out on the street. He's the guy that gets things done but his methods may be a little bit rough. I really wanted a character that was a throwback to some of those classic really tough 1970s heroes, like Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Idris has that real presence, that real physicality and you can read his thoughts in such a telling way. Briar is in that classic western loner tradition, like some of those cowboy heroes, and Idris really can carry that off. He can own the screen and is able to convey what it is he's thinking by doing very little."

'There are very few actors of that calibre," continues David Watkins. 'Michael Fassbender, Daniel Craig and Idris Elba are among the few - they have the physical presence and the movie star presence, but they also have the real acting chops. It's obviously a skill that they've nurtured but it's also innate: it's that sense of truth and the sense of being able to register thought in a really cinematic way. It was such a pleasure watching Idris Elba work; you can read the cogs turning in his head, in his eyes, in such a subtle way. It means you can dispense with so much unnecessary dialogue. For me, cinema is about reading what the characters are thinking, what's going on behind their eyes."

Idris Elba describes Sean Briar as 'a CIA veteran, he's been around for a long time and the posting in Paris is a step down for him after the high profile covert work he was doing before. He's an army guy who just wants to get the job done and go home. His boss, Karen, instructs him to go and get Michael, who's the prime suspect in the bombing, but Briar believes that there's more to the story than that. So he has to follow his hunch even though he's disobeying orders. These two characters - Briar, and Michael- make for an unlikely duo of heroes. They're thrown into a drama and they are forced to team up and navigate their way through the twists and turns of the story. It's not just action for action's sake. It's an action-packed film; but at the heart, there are characters that you care about and there's a very compelling storyline. Bastille Day feels unique and modern, because it's a European take on an action film."

Playing the American petty thief who inadvertently becomes embroiled in a huge conspiracy when he blithely robs a young French woman is Scottish actor, Richard Madden, best known for his performances in smash hit TV series, Game Of Thrones, and Kenneth Branagh's recent cinema adaptation of Cinderella, co-starring with Lily James and Cate Blanchett. With Idris Elba in place as Sean Briar, it was a challenge to find an actor who would match his formidable screen presence. 'Michael is a tricky role," explains James Watkins. 'He could be very unlikable because he's essentially a guy that steals from people and ruins people's lives. At his audition, Richard brought charm but also danger to the character and was able to walk the line between those two facets with incredible subtlety."

For his part, Michael Madden saw the character of Michael as 'a street rat, with not much of a moral compass or sense of responsibility for his actions. He's an American pickpocket in Paris, and he's a bit adrift, but he's got this incredible skill set, he's really wonderful at what he does. But I think he's not sure who he is and who he wants to be and he's slightly lost in the world and has a certain sense of perhaps self-loathing and but he's really ready to embark on a journey and try to find a different side of himself."

Madden adds, 'I wanted to immerse myself in the character and get to know him, to understand him. When we first meet Michael, he doesn't have any sense of direction; he's stealing and is very good at it and is saving up a lot of money but for no real reason. He's treading water. Then he sees Zoe in the street, crying while on her phone, and he realises there's something in her bag which is very important, so he steals it. And that decision to steal the bag changes his life, because when he throws it away, he inadvertently sets off the bomb which has fatal consequences. It's the first time that he has to take responsibility for something he's done.

And he struggles with that moral dilemma during the course of the film; he's always asking himself if it was his fault that four people died, or if it was Zoe's fault because she had the bomb in the first place."

After an action-packed chase across the rooftops of Paris, Briar brings Michael in and it's during his interrogation that Briar begins to doubt the official version of events and believe that there may be some truth to Michael's story. 'Michael sees this glimmer of humanity in Briar and that he actually might believe him. They set off on a journey together because Michael realises that the police are out to kill him so he has no one apart from Briar. One of the things I loved most about the script was the relationship between Briar and Michael. They are polar opposites but they are both alpha males in their own way. What makes it interesting is Michael is an alpha male in a very modern, young-man-about-town way while Briar's a classic dominant alpha male. Put these two together and they're constantly trying to outdo each other! They are forced together over an intense couple of days and these two friendless men start a begrudging friendship."

It was the first time the two actors have collaborated, but it was a happy experience for both. 'Richard Madden's a great actor," says Idris Elba. 'He's really enthusiastic and very open. We had a great time working together. It was interesting exploring the bond between the two characters because the bond between us, personally, was also growing."

Both actors used improvisation that helped to build a real and exciting relationship for Briar and Michael. Says Richard Madden, 'On one of our first days on set together, we were filming a scene inside a car in a car park for a whole day and we started playing around with a couple of the scenes, firing things back and forth to each other, just having some fun and making sure our American accents were spot on. We thought, this kind of works for the characters, having digs at each other and bantering, so we fed it into the scenes and there ended up being a lot of improv at the start or end of the scene. Even if it isn't used in the final cut, the experience of playing around like that with Idris Elba helped to build the screen relationship between our two characters."

A key reason why Madden was so keen to join the project was James Watkins. 'I was just really taken by James Watkins," he says. 'He seemed so passionate about filmmaking and with this film; he wanted to hark back to films like The French Connection and Pickpocket. That was very appealing to me." Richard was a front runner and he fulfilled every promise during the shoot," says David Kanter. 'He's charming and funny and smart and he works incredibly hard. Richard learned to pickpocket from the magician we hired to teach him and he's really good at it!" Rising French Canadian star Charlotte Le Bon plays French activist and bomb mule, Zoe. Zoe's youthful idealism leads her into a plot to detonate a bomb in an empty building but she has a last minute change of heart and decides to abort the mission. When her bag containing a bomb is stolen by Michael, she is forced into a precarious partnership with Michael and Briar in a fight for survival.

'Charlotte really surprised me in the audition because there was rawness and a vulnerability to her," says James Watkins. 'Charlotte has no vanity, she's very beautiful but she doesn't care about any of that and she was happy to take all the make-up off and look terrible. She really embraced the very raw side of Zoe. She's a real find and like Idris and Richard, she has a real sense of truth as an actor, which is what a director is always looking for."

'I met with James and really liked his approach to the material. He explained he didn't want to make a glossy action movie, but an action movie with a believable story and characters. He wanted it to look real, and that really appealed to me," says Le Bon. 'I also liked these three antiheroes and when I knew that Idris and Richard were playing these characters I felt honoured to be part of the cast."

'Charlotte is a great leading lady to work with and a very talented actress," says Madden. 'Zoe brings out the compassion in Michael; he becomes aware of his own responsibility for the events and he realises that Zoe's going through a similar thing and they start to share this burden. As the film goes on he becomes quite protective of her because he sees her as someone who's very vulnerable."
Rounding out the cast are Thierry Godard as Rafi, the embittered head of the elite SWAT team, and popular French-Spanish actor Jose Garcia who plays Viktor Gamieux, the French Minister of Homeland Security. 'I wanted to have a real sense of authenticity about the film, and so I need French actors speaking in French and it had to have that sense of truth about it," says Watkins. 'They were an absolute delight to work with and it brought a very different energy. They grounded the whole film for me in a sense of truth."

The Look

'I wanted to make a big Friday night out film" exclaims James Watkins. The director's ambitions for Bastille Day were one of the reasons the producers approached him. This was to marry big budget commercial thrills with kinetic, in-your-face shooting style with handheld cameras up close and personal with the actors, to get right in the middle of the action. 'We wanted to be close enough to feel them, to feel their breathing, to be right in their eyes. A lot of the actions shots are from a subjective point of view, so as a viewer you feel completely in the moment. I'm not interested in CGI which creates scenes that defeat the laws of physics! So, however large the story is, everything should always have an emotional sense of truth. Ultimately, you go to the movies to see people and so the closer you are to those people, the more you'll enjoy the experience."

Watkins' first point of reference was the New York films of the 1970s and 1980s such as Prince Of The City, The French Connection and Serpico. 'They're very much grounded in the moment and have that really gritty feel and I was looking to marry that with bigger American production values," he says.

The film cranked up in Paris in October 2014 and in a stroke of good fortune for a film set in mid-July, the weather stayed mostly clear and sunny. Watkins and his team were keen to shoot in unfamiliar parts of the French capital. As well as using some of the most famous locations of Paris such as the Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre, the team shot in more obscure places including the suburbs outside Paris, the Banlieues which house many of the city's poorest and most deprived citizens.

Idris Elba was very enthusiastic about Watkins' decision. 'I'm a big fan of films using cities in a way that don't seem touristy, and this film lets the audience discover a very different side of Paris. James Watkins was very specific about that; he wanted to make Paris a part of this film in a way that we haven't seen in a film for a while."

Madden agrees: 'It was great to go to parts of Paris which are very residential and outside the centre. Yes, we see the Grand Boulevards and other touristy parts, but there are lots of scenes inside apartments or apartment buildings, in abandoned buildings, dark alleys. The film offers a real spectrum of what Paris has got to offer."

'We hope the film gives audiences everywhere a different perspective on what a tough, muscular and serious city Paris is," says Kanter. 'It's not just a beautiful place, it's also a tough working city and I think we get into that in a very meaningful way for the story."

Filming The Action

One of the most visually impressive and logistically challenging set pieces is the rooftop chase at the beginning of the film featuring Idris Elba's character, Sean Briar, and Richard Madden's character, Michael Mason. The chase starts in Michael's apartment, moves out and up to the rooftops of Paris and then plummets into the hustle and bustle of a crowded market.

The filmmakers were fortunate to be able to take over the entire rooftop of the BHV department store, right in the middle of the Marais area, opposite the Paris city hall, the Hotel de Ville. Six weeks of prepping went into shooting the sequence, including weeks of training for the two actors. 'We wanted to showcase Paris in this scene, but also introduce our two heroes and have a sense of the world in which they're in," says Watkins. 'It's early on in the film, so we're not sure who we're supposed to be rooting for and the points of view shift. Do we want Michael to get away?

Do we want Briar to catch Michael? That's the whole nature of their journey together, this constant push-pull and the sense of their being opposed to finding some commonality.

'In terms of the shooting the rooftop chase, I wanted it to have a real pace and reality to it, so we built rooftop upon rooftop in Paris," he continues. 'I didn't want to do it through visual effects, so the backdrop that you see is a real backdrop of the city of Paris. We went back to really oldschool traditions of Harold Lloyd and saying okay, how can we cheat this."

Production designer Paul Kirby built a fake roof on top of the BHV to enable the actors to run across and appear to be right on the edge of a seven-story building with the whole of Paris stretched out behind them. 'I wanted to get that sense of pace on the rooftop so it was important to create a set the actors could really run along," says Watkins. 'And I wanted the vertiginous sense of the danger, a sense of 'Wow, this is one hell of a drop!"

Not only is the chase scene an exhilarating piece of action, but it's also a pivotal moment in the characters emotional narrative. For it's during the chase that Briar realises that Michael isn't going to be a pushover but will put up a formidable fight. 'We really went at it," laughs Elba.

'We had stuntmen, of course, but we did do a lot of it ourselves, there was lots of running around, jumping. It was a great experience, tiring and exhausting but definitely worth it."

The actors did most of the stunt work, including the fight scenes. Not having to cut between the actors and stuntmen was a way of keeping the film grounded in reality. Stunt coordinator Jimmy O'Dee worked for several weeks with the actors, preparing them for the scene. He would cut the action into manageable parts and then design the choreography of the fight and the actors would train together until they were completely in sync.

These stunt scenes required maximum commitment from the two actors. Elba and Madden felt it was imperative they prepare fully for the roles both physically and emotionally and spent many hours in training so they were in peak physical shape for the action scenes.

'Jimmy O'Dee, the stunt co-ordinator, was really specific about being fit," says Elba. 'I've never done a film with so many fight sequences before, and I loved it. I have a little martial arts training so it was great fun for me to exercise some of my knowledge. I think the film definitely attempts to be as raw in the fight sequences as we can get. Scrappy was the word I kept hearing. I mean it really feels like you're in there."

Madden was just as thrilled to be involved in the action scenes. He started training with the stunt team about six weeks before filming. 'They built these 15-foot high obstacle courses which I'd have to run up and over, jumping over things, throwing myself through windows, tumbling down stairs. It was really tough but it prepared me for the chase sequences where I had to scramble over roofs and hang off the edge of buildings. It was important that it didn't look too professional because Michael isn't a base jumper or anything; he's just an ordinary guy, so the rooftop chase is quite scrappy. I wanted him to slip and fall and really scrambling for his life trying to get away."

A more interesting aspect of the training for Madden was learning how to pickpocket. Working with a consultant named, appropriately, Keith the Thief, Madden learned sleight of hands tricks and distraction techniques. 'We wanted some of the manoeuvres he pulls to be a bit flamboyant so that it reflects Michael's cockiness at his own ability. James was very keen to make sure that that the stealing didn't appear to be like magic, but that it seemed realistic. So if anyone watching the film on DVD pauses and watches it in slow-motion to check it's really me doing it, I did actually do it!"

Another of the main set pieces which required a tremendous amount of preparation was the bomb blast. Production designer Paul Kirby, and his team, built a replica Metro stop into the back of a building located right outside of Paris.

'It was a big challenge to find the location for the bomb blast scene in the square," says Kirby. 'It had to look like you were in the center of Paris but for obvious reasons we couldn't film that sort of scene in the center. So we were looking for somewhere that was quieter, which could be dressed to be a busier part of town. We built a Metro station frontage, which was quite complicated as it had to look at if it was at the top of a flight of steps as all the metro station entrances are in Paris and then we built a newspaper stand so that those two elements would take most of the blast and we built one or two facades in the background. The actual blast itself wasn't that huge as James felt that was more chilling, you don't see debris going everywhere but once the dust settles you see the destruction on a more human level."

David Kanter adds 'Richard worked really hard. He was pulled on a wire, repeatedly, to dramatize the force of the explosion. Everything had to be timed out right; there's the explosion part which we did in different sizes and is comprised of many different components that convey a truly awful moment. It plays as a whole piece quite beautifully. James and Tim covered it from every angle possible so that Jon Harris and our visual effects artists could build a sequence that would be as realistic as possible."

The production moved from Paris to London for the final four weeks of filming. The biggest location was at the Naval War College in Greenwich standing in for the Paris streets around the Bank of France, the site of the huge riot scene at the end of the film. Filming in Paris would have been too logistically difficult and the contained nature of the location gave Watkins and his crew complete control over the action.

Bastille Day
Release Date: May 12th, 2016