Paris

Femme Fatale, shot entirely in Paris and the surrounding areas, required the American-born director to investigate the hidden landscapes and concealed corners within the City of Lights to uncover the most interesting and appropriate locations to film.

"The image many Americans have of Paris is Gene Kelly and Frenchmen wearing berets," says De Palma with a laugh. "The first thing I realized is that the city looked more like New York than I had imagined, it's very cosmopolitan. I spent much of my time in Belleville observing the Arab, Spanish and Chinese communities, which I thought would make an intriguing location for our budding artist, Nicolas. I took countless photos during the month of scouting, and from those, chose where I would film."

"Femme Fatale has a uniquely Parisian flavor," Gefter agrees, who has lived in France for the past seven years. "I greatly appreciated Brian's adventurous spirit with the locations. He would take his scooter out at dawn every day to find places American filmmakers had never before shot, some of which even we had never seen!"

Contemporary Film Noir

Film noir, typified by its dark tone and gritty characterization, matches De Palma's thematic objectives of creating a look and feel that are as intrinsically important to Femme Fatale as the action itself. "Cinema is based on the visual. It's a voyeuristic art that spies on people who are spying on those around them," De Palma imparts. "For this film, we used a certain aesthetic bias unique to film noir, but my filmmaking is founded on having a very mobile camera, which is a direct contradiction to that style–except for Preminger and Orson Welles. Femme Fatale uses too much camera movement to be termed a classic film noir, but we do incorporate many noirish qualities in a contemporary way."

Director of Photography Thierry Arbogast fused De Palma's progressive visual style with the deliberate static approach of film noir. "I've always especially liked the form of De Palma's films, his concept of playing on our visual memory," says Arbogast. "His use of recurring images and dabbing in different levels of reality can also be found in Femme Fatale. What was interesting to me about filming Femme is that we chose a very stylized frontal lighting that's reminiscent of films from the Forties, which embellishes the actors and creates a play of shadows on their faces, highlighting every emotion.

"Another aspect of Brian's style is that he likes to film his actors in a relatively wide shot in order to allow the audience to look from one to the other as desired," discloses Arbogast. "Preparing scenes, Brian is absolutely systematic and sophisticated, yet with space for improvisation. He works like a craftsman and approaches complex sequence shots like a mathematical problem, while never losing sight of the style or aesthetic."