A real Eiffel

Cat’s Eyes producers Benjamin Dupont-Jubien and Mehdi Sabbar discuss achieving their dream of bringing the cult Japanese mangas to the screen, relocating the action to Paris and how they utilised the city’s iconic landmarks in this crime heist series.

While every television production faces a deadline to complete filming, the team behind French heist drama Cat’s Eyes found themselves in a unique race against time – with the Olympics.

Shooting in Paris is complicated enough, requiring numerous permissions before cameras can start rolling on its streets and boulevards. Yet as the city was hosting the quadrennial sporting feast earlier this summer, the team from production company Big Band Story faced a definitive cut-off point if Cat’s Eyes was to complete filming at multiple iconic landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, before Olympic preparations began.

“They had to shut down Paris in order to prepare for the Olympics, so we had to finish in March,” executive producer Benjamin Dupont-Jubien tells DQ. “They were not keen on letting people shoot. They had other priorities in mind. Having people at big monuments for them was not a good idea, so we had lots of obstacles to overcome.”

“We were in a rush,” admits fellow EP Mehdi Sabbar. “We knew that if we couldn’t shoot in October then the series may be postponed by two years.”

Thankfully, filming was completed on time and the six-part series debuted on France’s TF1 in November. Distributor Newen Connect has also sold the show to international networks Rai in Italy, RTL in Belgium and RTS in Switzerland, while it was coproduced with ZDF in Germany and produced in association with Prime Video, which will air the series in Latin America, Japan and in France after TF1.

Based on the cult manga series Cat’s Eye by Tsukasa Hojo, Cat’s Eyes stars Camille Lou (Women at War), Constance Labbé (Balthazar) and Claire Romain (Where It All Begins) as the Chamade sisters – Tam, Sylvia and Alexia – who are on the prowl for the most beautiful artworks in Paris.

After years apart, the siblings reunite to steal a work of art on display in an exhibition at the Eiffel Tower, hoping it might help them solve the mystery behind their father’s disappearance years earlier when a fire broke out at his art gallery.

Police chief and head of the organised crime unit Quentin Chapuis (Mohamed Belkhir) is soon on their trail – but he is unaware he is actually tracking the love of his life, Tam.

Directed by Alexandre Laurent (Women at War), the series was created by Michel Catz, who wrote the scripts with Justine Kim-Gautier, Antonin Martin-Hilbert, Anne-Charlotte Kassab, Coline Dussaud and Audrey Gagneux.

An adaptation of the mangas has been in the works for more than seven years, with Dupont-Jubien and Sabbar both big fans of the Japanese comics and subsequent 1980s anime. Notably, it took five years just to secure the rights to Hojo’s work, after detailed negotiations.

“The main concern of the creator was, ‘What are you going to do with my characters and with the content of my manga?’ We had to convince him we had a great vision for the show,” says Dupont-Jubien. In particular, they were interested in exploring how the Chamade sisters first became thieves, which is not revealed in the source material.

“They are super powerful, super skilful. They are very rich. They have all the means they want to steal the paintings they are seeking in order to find their father,” he continues. “I always wondered as a child, when I was looking at the manga and the anime, how did they become the Cat’s Eyes? This area, which is not in the mangas, was interesting to us and we always fantasised about what happened to them at the time.

“We talked to Tsukasa Hojo about the fact we wanted to do an origin story, which was something that really appealed to him. He found the idea very interesting, and then the fact we also had it in mind to shoot in Paris was a big plus.”

“The manga takes place in the late 70s in Tokyo, so we changed everything and the series is now set up in Paris,” Sabbar notes. “We changed the country and the time when the story takes place. There is the manga and there was an anime, and the anime aired in France in the late 80s and early 90s, when we were young. That’s also a reason why we wanted to make this series, because when we were kids we watched the anime on TV.”

Though the Tokyo setting has been replaced by modern-day Paris, the core elements of the story have been retained, namely the competitive spirit between the sisters and the tension between them, despite their love for each other.

The creatives also wanted to make the character of Quentin more prominent in the series. “In the manga, the guy is really dumb not to see that it’s his girl he is chasing, so we had to make him a little more clever or more aware of what’s going on,” Dupont-Jubien says. “So we adapted things. When you adapt, you have to betray [the source material], but you have to be truthful at the same time. We tried to be true to the spirit of the manga, but we changed many things.”

Head writer Catz was equally passionate about the project, and worked up 80 pages of notes to outline the ambition of the series for the pitch to Hojo. That document then served as a solid foundation for the writing process, while the visual style of the show, not least the sisters’ costumes, was particularly inspired by both the manga and the anime.

Where creative changes were made, the producers were emboldened by Hojo, who encouraged them to make the project their own. “We had a clear vision. We had rules that we wanted to respect,” Dupont-Jubien says.

“For example, in the manga, since it’s a manga, they can jump six metres high. It doesn’t matter. Lots of things didn’t make sense [for television] and we decided very early in the process that the rules of gravity would apply to them. And when they fall, they will fall hard and hurt themselves. They will suffer to become the thieves they’re going to become, because otherwise we wouldn’t believe it; otherwise you do something cartoonish. The ambition was not to do a cartoonish series. It was to do a realistic series with characters you can believe.”

“We wanted to make them true in terms of emotion, in terms of reaction and in terms of the way we worked on the heists themselves. They’re spectacular,” Sabbar adds. “Sometimes they are a little over the top, because it’s the fun of the series to do that. Otherwise it’s boring. But you want to believe in them.”

Cat’s Eyes was filmed “99%” on location across Paris, with landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles all featured on screen. As these were established in the scripts early on, the producers had a head start in seeking permissions to film at each one, and they often found fans of the original anime at the venues.

In particular, the Eiffel Tower makes for a spectacular backdrop to some vertigo-inducing stunts in the opening episode, with the production utilising the full scale of Gustav Eiffel’s 330-metre-tall monument.

“There were many ropes and many people used to secure the actors,” Sabbar says. “But we also had to secure the guy who filmed the actors – and on a monument like the Eiffel Tower, we had our stunt crew but also the people from the tower who supervised the stunt crew. It meant a lot of preparation and authorisation to let Camille Lou on the structure and to climb the tower.”

“She was very excited during the preparation, but during the week we shot there, it started to rain a lot and get very cold,” Dupont-Jubien says. “Sometimes at 4am when you’re in the middle of doing the scene and it’s raining and you’re cold, suddenly going on the structure of the Eiffel Tower is not that fun anymore. You’d rather be in your bed. You have to walk along the beam in the rain, even though you have cables everywhere, so it’s not fun.”

The production had the use of the tower every night for a whole week during October last year to ensure they could complete filming there before work began to install the Olympic rings on the side of it – a feat that was unveiled in June ahead of the Games.

“So the only slot we had [to film] was at the end of October,” Dupont-Jubien says. “It was a little scary for all of us, but the director really pulled it off. It was also an experience that really brought everyone together. The fact we pulled it off in one week, we were very proud of it and it launched the series for the rest of the shoot.”

With a major landmark featuring in every episode – the River Seine also plays a big role – there were further challenges in store. In one episode, action takes place on the roof of the Hôtel des Monnaies, one of the oldest buildings in the city, which called for more support structures and wires to ensure the safety of the cast and crew.

But it was all part of the creative team’s ambition to keep the series fresh and exhilarating for viewers. “One of the challenges of the series was not to be repetitive in terms of what you offer the audience because, after three episodes, you could find it’s always the same thing – they go somewhere, they take a painting,” Dupont-Jubien says.

“In order to avoid that, which is something Tsukasa Hojo did well in the mangas, we had to find other locations and situations to surprise the audience, and I think we found some great stuff. We changed the [visual] grammar. We also changed some scenes so the setup was different. We changed the music, the atmosphere. The mood is different from one episode to another.”

Despite all the time and location challenges they faced, the duo say their fondest memory of making the show – which had a budget of €25m (US$26.3m) – is when they were able to present it to Tsukasa Hojo. “We showed him the first episode and he was very moved by it,” Dupont-Jubien says. “It was a great moment because, since I was a child, I had been dreaming of his mangas and anime, and the fact we could produce a series that was touching to him was a proud moment for me.”

“We are also very proud because we are an independent company, and it was not easy for an independent company to produce a huge project like this,” says Sabbar.

The pair now hope international viewers are as dazzled by Cat’s Eyes as viewers in France, where almost seven million people tuned in to the first episode.

“We know the episodes are very spectacular and also the characters are moving,” Sabbar adds. “We show Paris as never before, because we show all the monuments in the series. We hope and we think the audience all over the world would like to see an action series in Paris.”

tagged in: Benjamin Dupont-Jubien, Big Band Story, Cat’s Eyes, Mehdi Sabbar, Newen Connect, Prime Video, Rai, RTL, RTS, TF1, ZDF