Shubhabrata Dutta
Prime Video’s ‘Étoile’ is a ballet drama series created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. The show follows Geneviève, the interim general director of Le Ballet National and l’Opéra Français in Paris, and Jack, executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theater at New York City’s Lincoln Center, who decide to swap their top ballet dancers for a year. The aim is to save their respective ballet companies by attracting audiences and restoring the prestige of the art form. To showcase the energy of the dance form and have a grounded approach toward the ballet culture, the production team opted for real settings and backdrops for filming. This further helped them highlight the visuals, which are important, if not essential, for depicting any art form on screen.
Étoile Filming Locations
Filming of ‘Étoile’ took place in New York City and Paris, France, with additional scenes in New Jersey. Principal photography reportedly began in February of 2024 and lasted for several months before wrapping up by the first week of November the same year. Since the show deals with ballet, the crew resorted to opera houses and performance centers across the two cities while ensuring they captured the contrast in the aesthetics of the two locations. This further enabled them to add another layer of “differences” between the two ballet companies. “In both cities, we had to sort of Frankenstein monster build what our fictional theater was like.” Daniel Palladino told GMA News Online.
New York City, New York
The exterior of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, situated at Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023, was used to film many outdoor scenes showing the Metropolitan Ballet Theater. Home to world-renowned performing arts companies like the New York City Ballet and Metropolitan Opera, it is befitting that the crew captured the beautiful buildings and the iconic Revson Fountain.
The area around Lincoln Center Plaza was also used to shoot several scenes, including conversations between the directors of the ballet companies and interactions between extras. Additional outdoor scenes were reportedly shot in the Upper West Side, Manhattan, including the area in and around 74th and Amsterdam Avenue, as well, to provide an urban setting. As for the indoor shoots, the crew used the sitting arrangement of the Metropolitan Opera, AKA the Met, to film many behind-the-scenes moments in the show.
Newark, New Jersey
The crew got access to the stage of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), located at 1 Center Street, Newark, NJ 07102, where they captured various scenes involving ballet performances and practice. “We used the stage in New Jersey, and then the interior of the theater, where it’s getting into the seats and stuff like that, that’s The Met,” Amy told GMA News Online. Home to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra (NJSO), the New Jersey Performing Arts Center is well-reputed for its gorgeous architecture and clear acoustics, and is a crucial component of the state’s appreciation for art and culture.
Paris, France
In Paris, the crew used the interiors of the Palais Garnier opera house, located at Place de l’Opéra, 75009 Paris, including its costume studio and the grand rooms, to film as many scenes as possible to showcase the dancers in their private moments. In the show, it is a crucial location for Le Ballet National. Besides this, the exterior of the Salle Favart opera house and theatre, located at 1 Place Boieldieu, 75002 Paris, was used to capture shots of audiences arriving for shows and more. Salle Favart is the home of the Opéra Comique, an 18th-century opera company. The opera house is known for its gorgeous and detailed historical architecture and is named after the renowned French playwright/theater director Charles-Simon Favart. The Palais Garnier also doubled for the Grand Foyer shown in ‘John Wick 4.’
The production team also accessed the interiors of the mid-19th-century Théâtre du Châtelet, located at 1 Place du Châtelet, 75001 Paris, to film additional indoor scenes. With a seating arrangement of 2,500 people, the Théâtre du Châtelet has one of the largest auditoriums in Paris. While the painted walls provide a neo-renaissance look, the building itself offers secondary entertainment in the form of the Joséphine Night Club, a room inside having been transformed for today’s culture. The abovementioned locations help ground the show in reality. Still, the crew had to shoot in custom-built sets to provide the creators full freedom on the story’s depiction.
Talking to the Los Angeles Times, Sherman-Palladino stated how, for dancers, “Everything’s inside of a building, and they go in that building in the morning and they stay there. We wanted to make sure that the interiors of the sets could accommodate life like that. As much as we were looking at the studios, it was also looking at the hallways and the hangout places and looking at where the couches were.” For this, they chose Studios d’Epinay, located at 10 Rue du Mont, 93800 Épinay-sur-Seine. One of the oldest studios in Europe, it became the workshop for production designer Bill Groom, whose team took great care in transforming a huge sound stage into rehearsal rooms, offices, and hallways that doubled for those of the Le Ballet National.
To enable the camera to move freely, the team constructed interconnected rooms. They also built a columned dance space that partly represented the rehearsal room of the Palais Garnier. Sofas and chairs were also added so dancers could rest between takes. “We have to be aware of what you see in the wings when the cameras on the stage are following the performers,” Groom told the Los Angeles Times. “As an audience member seated in the house, you don’t see into the wings usually, so we had to make that real as well. We knew we would be shooting in hallways and outside the rehearsal spaces too, so we needed to experience the space the way the dancers would.”
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