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ALLSTAR, BBC
bricks and mortar. Period-
perfect exteriors are grist to the
mill for lavish historical dramas,
a genre that is growing in global
reach (the UK-based
Downton
Abbey
, for instance, sells to
more than 200 territories, from
Chile to Taiwan). So, in the BBC’s
case, 17th-century castles have
been standing in for Jacobean
chateaux; baroque boulevards
for the haunts of Cardinal Richelieu (played here by the
new
Doctor Who
, Peter Capaldi).
“As funny as it sounds, Paris doesn’t have much
of what we need for this show,” says producer Colin
Wratten, pausing for a chat in
The Musketeers
barracks.
“What we need are the very narrow, older streets – and
buildings that haven’t been completely spruced up.”
He waves a paw at the monastery, which is just outside
Prague in the small village of Doksany. “It’s much easier
to come in and do our design work on properties like
this, which are older and tireder.”
It was this richness of canvas that first brought
the global filming boom to Prague in the 1990s.
Rick McCallum, the Hollywood producer behind the
Star Wars
prequel trilogy, remembers the early days of
the boomwell. When the Wall fell in 1989, he happened
to be in Berlin scouting locations for George Lucas’s TV
series,
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
.
“We didn’t know exactly what was going to happen,
but you could feel in the air that the world was going
to change,” he recalls. Pretty soon, it became clear
that East Germany was a non-starter. “There was no
infrastructure whatsoever. But then, in November of
’89, Prague fell – and I rushed over immediately. It was
palpably different. It wasn’t as poor as East Berlin. You
could tell that it was just so hungry and ready.”
What Prague also had was an established film
hub, thanks to the city’s grand old dame of cinema,
Barrandov Studios, which opened in 1931. Communism
may have clipped Barrandov’s political wings, but its
creative output remained impressive. The Prague Spring
– a short period in 1968 when the Czech government
defied Moscow’s communist diktats by encouraging
the arts - helped bring a newwave of Czech films to
worldwide attention, helmed by future Oscar-winning
directors Jiří Menzel and Miloš Forman. Czech movies
were high spec, too, renowned for their beautiful
STARRING IN PRAGUE
01
The Musketeers, with
Luke Pasqualino
facing front
02
2006’s Casino Royale
03
Matt Damon in The
Bourne Identity, 2002
04
Director Brian De
Palma and Tom
Cruise, filming
Mission: Impossible
»
If you’vewatched
amoviein the past two
decades, then you’ve
seen the Czechcapital
standingin for Paris,
London, Moscow
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C E L L U L O I D C I T Y
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