Fanspot
Interior scenes
“It began as a holiday….”
Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson)
The French Dispatch location scouting team finds everything Wes Anderson is looking for in Angoulême. The city is calm and welcoming, full of winding streets, offers beautiful landscapes and is easily accessible from Paris thanks to the TGV line. Nevertheless, when the time came to make his choice, Wes Anderson was definitely convinced by the possibility of investing in an old felt factory located in Gond-Pontrouve. Spacious and vacant, the site is perfect for the team to build all the sets for the interior scenes of the film. While usually, in the production of a multi-million dollar project like this, interiors are filmed in remote studios, Wes Anderson has the ability to truly centralize all operations around a single location.
It is thus inside the old factory that the offices of the French Dispatch, the newspaper at the center of the story, but also all the other rooms in which the characters evolve are built. On the outside, Wes Anderson even commissioned the construction of an entire building, meant to represent the back of the French Dispatch building, with a small interior courtyard.
A great fan of models, the director also had several built in Gond-Pontrouve. In total, 125 sets were created from scratch for the needs of the feature film.
Filled with colors evolving in pastel tones or more vivid, these sets also express the passion of Wes Anderson for French cinema. The French Dispatch was influenced by the works of Georges Méliès, Marcel Pagnol, Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Melville, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
While usually, the ephemeral sets of cinema are destroyed, the municipality decides to preserve them and to organize a free exhibition at the Chais Magelis, on the quay of the Charente. An event inaugurated by Wes Anderson and Bill Murray on the occasion of the presentation of the feature film at the CGR cinema, held from October 18, 2021 to January 2, 2022.
125 film sets were built inside the old felt factory of Gond-Pontrouve.
144 Rte de Vars
This former felt factory, made up of several buildings, now houses a company specializing in the manufacture of furniture.
The site was first exploited from 1840 by a flour mill. The owners construct buildings in place of two corn mills and two copper hammers. It was also here that a cannon drilling factory operated until 1810. In 1885, two spinners built several structures to create a felt factory. Prosperous, the company employed 409 people at the end of the 1980s. Despite everything, the factory closed. The buildings remained vacant for several years before being taken over by director Wes Anderson as part of the production of his film The French Dispatch in November 2018.
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The San Francisco Fantrippers map, an original way to discover the Californian city! Through 100 pop culture places, walk its streets from another angle. Movies, TV shows, music, comics and novels, will allow you to spend a pleasant moment in The City by the Bay. With a folded size of 10 x 18 cm and an unfolded size of 60 x 54 cm, it slips easily into your pocket or bag for easy reference.
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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.