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Fort Boyard
“But you know nothing about sailing!”
Albertine Monot (Guilane Londez)
Bruno Podalydès starts the production of Liberté-Oléron on the island of Oléron where his characters usually spend their summer holidays with their families. Exploiting the calm and the landscapes of this little piece of paradise, the filmmaker cannot avoid capturing with his camera the image of Fort Boyard. Facing the Saumonards beach and the Boyardville beach, the monument is already a worldwide celebrity thanks to the show produced and broadcasted by France Télévision.
Fort Boyard is largely visible on screen, often in the background, while the main character of Liberté-Oléron struggles to pursue a childhood dream and tries to buy a sailboat to set sail. When Bruno Podalydès moves further away from the coast, he gets closer to the building once used as a penitentiary and then as a target by German soldiers during the Second World War. Fort Boyard even invites itself in the dialogues at the end of the film. It must be said that this element of the Rochefort Dockyard is inevitable. The film team even comes very close when the protagonists make the crossing to the island of Aix.
At the time of shooting Liberté-Oléron, Bruno and Denis Podalydès had already made three films together: Versailles Rive Gauche, Voilà and Dieu seul me voit.
Fort Boyard
World-famous thanks to the television show to which it gave its name, Fort Boyard is one of the flagship monuments of the Charente-Maritime.
The construction of Fort Boyard began in 1804 and ended in 1857. Approved by Napoleon Bonaparte, the project takes place on a sandbank called the longe de Boyard.
Intended to protect the harbor from the English navy during the war between France and England, the building was finally transformed into a prison shortly after its inauguration.
Afterwards, it was abandoned and nicknamed the “Fort of Abandonment” by the inhabitants. It remains one of the most emblematic elements of the Rochefort Naval Arsenal. During the Second World War, German soldiers used it for shooting practice and damaged it.
Finally, after having passed through several hands, abandoned and then bought back, Fort Boyard regained its superb appearance in the early 1990s when the famous game show of the same name was produced there. The shooting of the show is a pretext for a thorough cleaning of the building. More than fifty centimeters of guano were removed and a considerable number of modifications and improvements were made. A lifting platform was also built to allow boats from Fouras to dock. Over the years, Fort Boyard became a real celebrity and gained a prestige that even Napoleon could not have imagined in his time.
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The café of Amélie, the mansion of Untouchables, the jazz club of the finale of La La Land, the Hôtel du Nord of the mythical replica of Arletty “Atmosphere”, the cinema of A bout de souffle, the restaurant of Ratatouille, the quays of the Seine of Midnight in Paris, the secret places of the Da Vinci Code, the grocery store of January in La Traversée de Paris , the Bridge of Inception and Peur sur la ville, the addresses of the spectacular scenes of Mission Impossible 6, but also series Call my agent, Gears, Le Bureau des légendes, Sense8, Sex and The City, Gossip Girl…
Etienne Daho’s Café de Flore, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s hotel in Nas in Paris, Serge Gainsbourg’s Poinçonneur des Lilas metro station, Serge Reggiani and Marc Lavoine’s Mirabeau Bridge, Mc Solaar’s Lyon station…
The places evoked in the comics Adèle Blanc-Sec, Largo Winch, Blake and Mortimer, Michel Vaillant…
But also in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Leo Malet, Daniel Pennac, Marc Levy, Guillaume Musso… you’ll find all the must-see places of Parisian Pop Culture in this new guide.
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By Gilles Rolland
Passionné de cinéma, de rock and roll, de séries TV et de littérature. Rédacteur de presse et auteur des livres Le Heavy Metal au cinéma, Paroles de fans Guns N' Roses, Paroles de fans Rammstein et Welcome to my Jungle : 100 albums rock et autres anecdotes dépareillées. Adore également voyager à la recherche des lieux les plus emblématiques de la pop culture.