Pierre Morel Q&A

- Paris is again at the heart of the movie, but alternates between tourist Paris and real Paris...

I live in Paris and I’m from Paris. You’re always torn between making it like a postcard and making it like Paris really is. In Taken, for instance, I really made it the way Paris is when you live in Paris wherever you live you don’t see the beauty of things anymore, so it’s a dark and not a very funny situation.

In this movie, because of the title From Paris with Love, we had to make it a bit more postcard-ish, but once again it evolves with the plot. In the beginning, we go to the Eiffel Tower and the nice parts of Paris and then, slowly but surely, we drift towards the edges, the places in Paris that people don’t want to see.

- How did you choose Kasia Smutniak, the female lead?

Kasia, beautiful girl! Her character, Caroline, lives in Paris and she's supposed to be French. There are a lot of great French actresses but they hardly speak good enough English to play the part, so we started looking outside of France.

Kasia is Polish but she's been living and working in Italy for years. I saw movies that she'd done and I was like "Wow, she is very, very good. Very attractive but very good." She was able to do a lot of the action stuff as well.

She has some action in the movie and she was able to be light and funny and nice, and the next second very emotional or very dark. We did a test with her and she just nailed it right away.

- John Travolta’s arrival in the movie is a big moment. How did you develop his character?

What I tried to do, which is something we talked a lot about with John, was to have John play the scene in a very logical straight-forward way and then have him do it in a funny way, almost over-acted, and then a much darker way, so that I would have a lot of options to make his character evolve within the scene.

That was really fun he could give you the super-serious straight one and then go crazy and then go even darker. By taking bits and pieces from one take to the other, you could build his character, who is a guy you never really know what to think of is he someone you can trust or not?

You never know and we enhance that by using different moods from different takes and building up his character. In contrast, Jonathan’s character, Reese, always acts the same way he's not at all as unpredictable as Wax.

The relationship between the two became very interesting in editing because we could make it evolve in probably a more creative way than we ever did on set.

- What was the most difficult scene to shoot?

There are a lot of complex scenes. A couple of action scenes were pretty tough. The final chase on the highway was tough because it's always weird to have a guy hanging from the car at 100 mph but it’s part of the thing and it was fun.

The shootout in the sweatshop, where the Chinese guys are working, was really tough. Time was limited, there was a lot of pyrotechnics, shots and blasts all over the place. That was a difficult one.

From Paris With Love is out now.

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