The director behind a new TV drama re-creating the 2015 Bataclan terror attack is pushing back against claims that filming inside the Paris concert hall was "indecent." Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, who took home an Oscar for best documentary feature in 2002 for Murder on a Sunday Morning, argues that the survivors whose stories shape The Living (Des Vivants) requested the real location to honor the truth of their ordeal. He told the Guardian that filming anywhere else would have felt like a betrayal of their experience. "We're making fiction so close to their real accounts that to film elsewhere would be trickery," de Lestrade said. "It would have made no sense."
The series, released ahead of the attack's 10th anniversary on Nov. 13, follows seven former hostages as they navigate life after the night Islamist gunmen stormed the Bataclan, killing 90 people inside the venue while forcing the hostages to watch. The mass shooting coincided with other attacks across the French capital, leaving 130 dead and nearly 490 injured. While the seven survivors supported the decision to film at the site, other survivors and relatives of victims found it upsetting.
"Some people find it indecent to reconstruct the scene of the tragedy where they suffered it and where their loved ones died," said Arthur Denouveaux, who escaped from the theater the night of the attack and now leads a survivors association. He added that the series blurs the line "between fiction and reality" by filming in the theater, and though he's heard it's "well done," he won't be watching it himself.
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Philippe Duperron, who leads another victims group after his son was killed in the attack, said reactions are mixed, but that people would've been just as upset if the series had been filmed elsewhere. De Lestrade suggested that viewers concerned about the Bataclan scenes could simply tune out for that portion. They make up just "eight minutes out of an eight-hour series," he told the Guardian.
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