We were there: the shooting of David Fincher's next film

In the middle of filming "The Killer" in Paris, the director of Fight Club let himself be approached by the curious and exchanged with admirers – starting with our journalist Damien Leblanc. Reportage in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

This is the event that surprised the very wise Fifth arrondissement of Paris at the beginning of November: the shooting of the next film by David Fincher. For five days, the American filmmaker and his team settled on the Place de l'Estrapade to shoot scenes from The Killer, an adaptation of the French comic book The Killer (written by Alexis Nolent, aka Matz, and drawn by Luc Jacamon) for Netflix, which stars Michael Fassbender as an implacable hitman beset by his own moral conscience after an unforeseen event.

Here, no spectacular security device, as one might have expected from a Hollywood production, but a shooting open to everyone's eyes – which did not fail to attract fans of the director of Seven and Gone Girl.

Very close to us we saw Michael Fassbender appear in a white suit giving him the air of a tourist from another time. The actor is filmed strolling along the sidewalk and then shoots a sequence, sitting on a bench, not far from his double dressed exactly like him.

Amazed by such promiscuity, passers-by felt free to chat with Fincher, a little as if they found themselves sitting with him in a Parisian cafe. Juliette Goffart, film critic and author of David Fincher, the obsession of evil, took the opportunity to offer Fincher this book that she dedicated to him last June: "Oh my God, the serial killers ... all my life! ", exclaimed the director, leafing through some passages from the book that evoke his (very pronounced) taste for the subject. In a word, the filmmaker also replied to a fan, who quoted him Rue de l'Estrapade (Jacques Becker's film released in 1953 and shot in the same district), that if he had not seen the film concerned, he found the setting and the positioning of the trees ideal.

On the last night of filming, as the warning lights coming from police cars illuminate the night with a blue light (we shoot a chase sequence with car stunts), the curtain closes: the surroundings of the Place du Pantheon, not far from the Place de l'Estrapade, are blocked to traffic. The curious are asked to stay away – it's Friday night, and the bars of the Latin Quarter attract partygoers. Barriers are placed to control the passage of night owls.

When the material is repacked and the weekend can begin, there are already whispers that filming will continue the following week in other districts of Paris and in Roissy and then he will fly to the Dominican Republic, New Orleans and Chicago. The film's release dated 2022. In the meantime, Parisians who were able to see David Fincher at work will keep these unpublished images for a long time in memory.