A Film Shoot in Marseille

Filming an advertising campaign along the Mediterranean

A few months ago I went on a business trip to Marseille. But it wasn’t just any business trip; it was a film shoot for one of my company’s clients, a large multinational corporation with a big office in Paris.

As a copywriter in an ad agency, I, along with three other creatives, had spent the previous months first writing dozens upon dozens of film scripts for a client that we had just won in a pitch — a Sisyphean process that entailed a ton of writing and rejections and re-writing and re-rejections and re-re-writing and re-re-rejections ad infinitum. Once they had approved the scripts for a series of commercials that were scheduled to go live in the summertime, we got in touch with a film production company and arranged the film production.

As our ad campaign was going to reach the entire country, they suggested that we shoot in Marseille. Why? Because when it comes to depicting France in its entirety, Marseille has everything covered. It has buildings that look like Paris, houses that look like Provence, beaches that look like the Mediterranean, countryside that looks like La France profonde, and people that look like all of France.

Unlike with Paris, which has a very distinctive look with its Haussmannian architecture, you can…