An interview with the director of "Paris 36"

For his nostalgic new movie "Paris 36," opening today at the Harvard Exit, writer/director Christophe Barratier was inspired by song, and by a time and place long gone. The film, about a group of neighbors who struggle to keep a music-hall theater open in 1936 Paris, features more than a dozen new songs by the French duo Reinhardt Wagner and Frank Thomas.

"Wagner and Thomas are a composer and lyricist, very famous in France," said Barratier on a recent Seattle visit. "Frank had written some magnificent lyrics that Reinhardt composed. Some of them were like little portraits, sketches, of a little neighborhood, working-class area in Paris. I was really inspired by these wonderful melodies, and step by step I imagined to make a re-creation, not a reconstitution, a re-creation — like a perfume — of this old Paris. I didn't want it to be too documentarist, too realistic. It was for me like a poetic vision of this period."

Barratier, who previously co-wrote and directed the 2004 Oscar nominee "Les Choristes," dove into the pleasurable task of researching the period, focusing not so much on the history but on the social background. He consulted "all the newspapers, of every political opinion, between 1935 and 1937, to understand what was daily life. On the front page you have always politics, and after, a little bit of foreign affairs, but then you have the crimes, the culture, the little ads. And from everything, every detail, you can understand what was the daily life of the French."

And with production designer Jean Rabasse, he set out to create 1930s Paris — but not without a few hitches.

"We went to the north end of Paris," said Barratier, "and we were a little scared because there was no one street left like in the '30s. Everything has been destroyed, renewed." So a new strategy was developed: re-create the era, on a soundstage. This way, said Barratier, "we would be able to draw exactly the Paris in our memory, and not to be too close to the reality. Like a poetical realism. We were like kids; we drew our own Paris knowing perfectly it was a set." Even the theater was built on set; Barratier and Rabasse had searched France and neighboring countries for a '30s-era theater that looked right, and didn't find one.

"It's a look I wanted for the movie," said Barratier. "Like a fable, like a tale. My option was more to say, 'Once upon a time in Paris ... "

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725

or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com