Occasionally, I will go outside of Hollywood to cover a film too interesting to ignore. Jacques Tati’s Playtime was a largely wordless comedy about the dangerous of modernizing Paris. To achieve this, Tati did something played for fantasy in Synecdoche, New York. His team constructed an entire city designed by the filmmaker and nicknamed Tativille. Now he would have total control of the buildings, the streets, windows, staircases, even the traffic lights. The most expensive film ever made in France at the time, the massive set required its own power plant. To save money, Tati only built out the structures he knew the film would go inside, so there were still a fair amount of facades. Tativille took seven months to build. (Tati defended the expense as being “cheaper than hiring Elizabeth Taylor.”) Playtime was shot in 70mm, and took almost a year and a half to complete. It must’ve been an incredible sight to walk through.
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