B13 Film Report
[Banlieue 13, starring David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9 at midnight, and again on September 10. This is a report on the Sept. 9 screening, at the Ryerson Theatre.]
I arrived around 11:40PM, and the lineup for ticket holders stretched one block east, turned the corner, and stretched another block south! The Ryerson theatre holds 1200 people, and it looked like it was more or less full. The audience looked like a normal film fest movie audience, full of artsy yuppie types--not so many who looked like young urban parkouristes.
Cyril Raffaelli, with the help of an interpreter, introduced the film, then did a Q&A session afterwards! I thought they only had actors for the big gala screenings, and certainly didn't expect to see any special guests at this movie. It was a pleasant surprise, and definitely made the $20 ticket more than worth it.
I'd seen B13 already, having downloaded it several months ago. It was a lot better on a movie screen with loud music, better subtitles, and an audience that was seeing parkour for the first time. Everyone was reminded that recording devices were not permitted, and that if you were found recording during the movie, Cyril would personally take care of you. I thought the warning kind of odd, seeing as it's been being pirated since, like, the spring.
Anyway, the film fest representative who introduced Cyril (seen to his right in the photo above) tried to explain a little about Le Parkour before the film, to give everyone an idea of what they would be watching. "Parkour is about getting from point A to point B as fluidly and quickly as possible, regardless of obstacles, as if you're being chased: running, leaping, jumping, climbing." He asked if anyone in the audience was familiar with parkour; of course I waved my arm, and I also heard a bunch of cheers from a group of people further back behind me. Assuming they weren't from PKTO, I wonder who they were... Cyril stressed that every stunt performed was done for real.
The audience loved every part of the beginning chase scene, of course, especially David's underbar dash through the window above the door, and they clapped and cheered at several parts throughout the movie--they loved the whole thing.
During the Q&A, Cyril answered a bunch of questions from the film fest guy, and then a bunch from the audience. Some questions concerned his martial arts background, and about how his career progressed. He started out with karate at age 15, then tae-kwon-do, got into circus school, did kung fu, and was actually France's kung fu champion (or something) in 1997, but had to stop devoting so much time to it because it was affecting his work. [It must be a real drag being a national champion...] He's certified for everything from skydiving to deep-sea diving to all those martial arts and driving all kinds of vehicles. His experience in movies includes doing stunts, body doubling (e.g. for Jean-Claude Van Damme in the movie Double Team), choreography, and now, acting.
One person asked how he felt about the English kid who fell off a roof and died while practicing parkour. Cyril's answer was something like this: "Well, you have to understand that I've been doing this since I was 15. I have worked on almost 70 movies. I am a professional. This is my discipline, my job--this is what I do. On every movie, we are a team of experienced people working together and we repeat, repeat, repeat everything and take every precaution so that we are able to never have any accidents. When I was little, I loved to watch Superman on TV, and I had a costume, but I didn't go jumping out windows."
Someone asked whether he practiced parkour himself. He said that while he didn't really practice parkour, it isn't very different from what he's been doing since he was 15. "Considering the actual definition of le parkour," he said, "it isn't what I do. Someone who does parkour does things extremely fluidly and efficiently, with no wasted motion. If you are doing a normal jump from one building to another [the interpreter chuckled here, such jumps not being very normal for most people], that is different from me, where I might do a flip. I was trained in the circus, so this is what I like to do. In France, we call this flashy style 'acro-street'."
Someone else asked, "Since you needed to learn a little about parkour for your role, did David need to be trained to fight?" Cyril answered, "There was fight training, and David had a lot of fun doing it. I wanted to use the fighting at the end to really show the difference in the two styles of the two characters: mine being very controlled, planning, and neat, and David's being more street. We are different in real life, too. I always enjoy training with David, and on this movie it was especially enjoyable, because training together, I pulled him a little into my world, and he pulled me a little into his."
Here's a small clip of someone asking if there will be a sequel to B13 (Leito and Damien are the names of the characters played by David and Cyril, respectively.)
The audience clapped some more, cheered some more, and we all left at 2AM.
Ricardo