page_title: Elle (film)
section_title: Filming
hierarchical_section_title: Elle (film) / Production / Filming
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Isabelle Huppert au festival de Cannes
context_page_description: Elle is a 2016 thriller film directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by David Birke, based on the novel Oh... by Philippe Djian. Djian's novel was released in 2012 and received the Prix Interallié. The film stars Isabelle Huppert as a businesswoman who is raped in her home by a masked assailant and decides not to report it due to her past experience with police.
  The film is Verhoeven's first feature since 2006's Black Book, and his first in the French language. It premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival where it received critical acclaim. Elle won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Foreign Language Film; it was also selected as the French entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not nominated. At the 42nd César Awards in France, the film received eleven nominations, and won Best Film.
  Huppert's performance was widely acclaimed, considered to be one of the finest of her career.
context_section_description: Principal photography began on 10 January 2015 for a ten-week shoot. Filming took place in and around Paris. A planned sequence in Paris' main police station was cancelled following the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January. The film was also shot in a house for Huppert's character in Saint-Germain-en-Laye for five weeks. Verhoeven's mise-en-scène for the film was influenced by three films: Federico Fellini's 8½, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Every scene was choreographed, and Verhoeven storyboarded the whole film himself. He chose to shoot the film with two Red Dragon cameras, as "These days the amount of time a director is given to make a movie has diminished by 40 to 50 percent. Working with two cameras solves part of that problem while giving you the opportunity to do things that you wouldn’t do before."
  When the film wrapped, Verhoeven described the shoot as "difficult" but later admitted that "in retrospect, it was very pleasant and easy." He dismissed rumors that Elle was an "erotic thriller" in the tradition of some his previous films, including Basic Instinct, "Those people who think that this is an erotic film will be disillusioned. They are in for a strange confrontation with a movie that is... not ordinary. I don’t think the story is erotic; it’s about rape. An erotic thriller would be a bit weird, right? I mean, it might be erotic for the person doing it, but I don’t think that rape in general is something you would call erotic." On 13 May 2015, he told Variety he had "a strong feeling with this one that I was doing something that I’d never done before, which applied when I made RoboCop." He also praised Huppert's performance, saying that "She is an extremely gifted actress that gives you more than what’s on paper… even what’s in the book. She does experiments in her mind to get to places that she would probably avoid in reality. And she does that in an absolutely unique way." He also said in an interview with Film Comment:
  She’s one of the most brilliant actors I’ve ever met in my life. She’s so extremely special and is able to avoid any cliché in any situation, always finding a different way of doing things. She comes up with all kinds of extra details that you wouldn’t even dream of, that I would never come up with on my own. She’s not only a great actress but she is also especially imaginative and creative in her approach to the character. I didn’t have to tell her anything about Michèle because it was clear from the first shot that she knew exactly what her character would do and how she would behave in whatever circumstance. She is extremely audacious and she really had no problem with anything that was in the script, so I have an enormous respect for her.
caption: Leading actress Isabelle Huppert
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