Filming Locations for La Nuit Americaine (Day For Night)

“Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the Old West. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.”

Francois Truffaut puts his love affair with the cinema centre-screen with this backstage movie about the making of a romantic melodrama – Je Vous Présente Pamela – (and it's dedicated to Dorothy and Lilian Gish).

The title refers to the Hollywood practice of filming night scenes with filters during daylight, called ‘day for night’, but known in the French industry as ‘nuit Américaine’ – ‘American night’.

The film-within-the-film is being made at the famed Studios la Victorine, 16 avenue Edoard Grinda, in Nice, where, almost 30 years earlier, Marcel Carné filmed his 1945 period classic Les Enfants Du Paradis.

Jacqueline Bisset arrives, and holds a press conference, at Aeroport Nice Cote d'Azur.

The cast act out more dramas than before the camera while staying at Nice’s four-star Atlantic Hotel, 12 boulevard Victor Hugo.

(Day For Night location, Atlantic Hotel)

A Propos de Nice: backstage dramas at the hotel: Windsor Hotel, Nice

The man from the British insurance company, who deals with a claim on the death of the leading man, might look familiar. It’s writer Graham Greene, in an uncredited cameo.