How the intensity of shooting ‘Blonde’ put Ana de Armas in the Marilyn Monroe mind-set
The shooting of “Blonde” on the streets of Paris and its aftermath
By Eileen BarkerPosted Friday, January 14, 2013 at 8:00 am
Eileen Barker/The Oregonian
As the cameras rolled, photographer Ana de Armas went up to an older man who sat on a porch. As her camera swung wildly, the shutter clicked down. The man seemed to smile. She shot through her bag — the cameras usually hold only one or two lenses — and put out her hand to be arrested.
“The people in his life had to be involved — there was a person,” de Armas said. “It was almost like someone had decided, ‘I want to document life.’”
De Armas was about to cover the stories of ordinary people as she and a camera crew documented a moment in the French capital. Instead, things turned ugly on Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.
It was the night of Jan. 6, 2012. French actress Emmanuelle Seigner was the subject of de Armas’s film. This photo shows the moment her car broke down and she left the house.
De Armas, 39, works as a model and photographer, but she also makes films. She and her partners recently began filming a French love story in the city that never sleeps, Paris.
It’s a project similar to the one de Armas made a decade ago, when she was shooting the New York film “Chorus,” which dramatized how a gay male chorus group in New York was torn apart by sexual violence as it became the face of the AIDS crisis.
On this night, though, the film’s subject had been killed by a gunshot wound, and it was the subject of a manhunt for an attempted murder as he sat on a park bench, a few hundred yards from the shooting scene.
“What made me think, ‘Oh, maybe this will be different than ’Ch
