World Courant
Style, East-West Asian identities, company espionage and romance are on the agenda in “Morning, Paris!,” a brand new mini-series mission being pitched at Sequence Mania by veteran filmmaker Quentin Lee (“The Folks I’ve Slept With, ” “White Frog”).
“‘Morning, Paris!’ is a heartfelt comedy a few younger fashionable BIPOC Canadian lady discovering herself in probably the most romantic metropolis on the planet,” says Lee. “Or put one other means, it’s a restricted tv collection about an aspiring feminine clothier from Vancouver who leads to Paris Style week with a impossible companion as a result of she desires to spy on her boss on whom she has a crush. It is ‘The Satan Wears Prada’ meets Robert Atman’s ‘Prêt-à-Porter’ with the sensibility of Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’.”
The mission was not all the time so merely outlined. It was beforehand conceived as a characteristic movie that was pitched on the Golden Horse Movie Pageant a decade in the past, and which mainland China powerhouse China Movie Group agreed to co-finance and co-produce.
With Robert Wei and Aaron Shershow on board as producers, the movie started pre-production in Prague in late 2015 and had incurred practically $1 million of prices. However, when a part of the finance collapsed, the opposite financiers bailed and preparations got here to a halt.
“We had solid the most well liked Chinese language abilities of the time, Michelle Chen Yanxi and Chan Xiao, who had been going to marry in actual life, because the star-crossed lovers. Sadly, the one-third investor dropped out… and since the producers weren’t capable of fill the hole, the manufacturing finally fell aside. I went again to Hong Kong and fell into melancholy till my surrogate mother texted me an ultrasound of my unborn son in her abdomen in October 2015. By the yr’s finish, I returned to Los Angeles and waited for my son to be born. He lastly got here in June of 2016,” Lee instructed Selection.
Lee has since re-fashioned the script as a collection and now units it as a possible Canada-France co-production involving his Margin Movies manufacturing firm. For the second time, Lee has hooked up Swan Pham, casting director of a number of Luc Besson movies, and costume designer Chattoune. He has added the French line-producer Thomas Buckwalder and cinematographer Valentina Caniglia.
“In North America, ‘Morning, Paris!’ sat on the shelf for nearly eight years till 2022, after I might began dabbling in tv and created ‘Comedy Invasion.’ Within the final 5 years, there has positively been a push in direction of range when it comes to content material creation in Canada. After promoting ‘Comedy InvAsian’ season 1 to Hulu in 2018 I made a decision to create a various Canadian content material stand-up collection which we pitched round however acquired little interest in improvement. I ended up financing it by way of my manufacturing firm, made and self-distributed it, and ended up receiving a Canadian Display Awards 2024 nomination for greatest comedy particular only a few days in the past,” says Lee.
“Final yr, when the PGA Worldwide Group organized a gathering with Movie Paris Area speaking about all the brand new tax rebates for France and Paris, it popped into my thoughts that ‘Morning, Paris!’ might make an amazing, cinematic restricted collection as a Canada-France co-production particularly. The 2 actually have a long-standing co-production treaty. The characteristic script was initially primarily based in Guangzhou and Paris, which I relocated to Vancouver and Paris. The (script for the) half-hour pilot got here out very effectively and after I noticed that Telefilm was internet hosting functions for the Canada-France Sequence Lab at Sequence Mania, I instantly utilized,” says Lee.
Lee has employed Largo AI, the Swiss agency that gives monetary and artistic modeling for movie and TV initiatives, to assist map out the mission’s potential. It exhibits that a mean of 436,000 households will stream the pilot in its first yr of streaming launch in Canada. An extra 1.5 million households will tune in in France and 11.1 million households watch it within the US
Quentin Lee’s ‘Morning, Paris!’ Mixes Comedy, Ambition
World Information,Subsequent Massive Factor in Public Knowledg
