France Tries to Lure Filmmakers PARIS - When Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones arrived in France recently for the shooting of "Malavita," a new mobster movie, they did not have to stray far from the set. While Hollywood stars often shuttle between cramped trailers on movie lots and five-star hotels an hour away, the cast of "Malavita" was provided with luxury suites overlooking the studio. Eric Pfanner for The IHT Christophe Lambert, chief executive of the EuropaCorp production house, in actors" residential quarters at the new Studios de Paris. The promoters of the newly opened Studios de Paris hope that French touches like these will give them an edge in a growing global competition to lure international film production and the millions of dollars it leaves behind for local businesses. Despite a troubled economy and an uncertain outlook for the media industry, a worldwide boom in studio-building is under way, with ambitious projects taking shape from the banks of the Seine to China. Studios de Paris is part of a €180 million, or $230 million, project called Cité du Cinéma, which has transformed a formerly gritty part of the Paris suburb of Saint Denis. It is centered on a decommissioned and renovated power plant, which houses a film school, a movie studio with nine stages and the headquarters of EuropaCorp, one France's biggest television and film producers. Cité du Cinéma is the brainchild of Luc Besson, chairman of EuropaCorp, director of movies like "The Fifth Element" and producer of the current box office hit "Taken 2." Mr. Besson's plan dates to 1997, when he wanted to shoot "The Fifth Element" in France but could not find a facility big enough. Instead, he had to use Pinewood Studios in Britain. "We built this site for French films but especially for the big American productions that generally go to Italy, to Luxembourg, to Switzerland or to England, but never to France, because we didn't have the tools to accommodate them," Mr. Besson said in an e-mail. "I've worked a lot with American actors," he added. I know how the studios operate. We have the best technicians in the world, and now we have the most beautiful stages as well. While France has the most vibrant domestic movie industry in Europe, many of the hundreds of films shot in the country annually are small-scale, character-led productions, not the big-budget special-effects extravaganzas that are Hollywood's specialty. It does not take much of a studio to shoot scenes of awkward family silences around the dinner table. EuropaCorp is the exception to this rule, making English-language, blockbuster-style pictures that regularly generate half of their box office receipts in the United States. But France has struggled to attract free-spending Hollywood productions, even as Britain, Germany and other European countries draw ever more of these projects. Studios de Paris aims to close the gap. With its giant former turbine hall and 9,500 square meters, or about 100,000 square feet, of sound stages, Cité du Cinéma, which was financed by a mix of public and private investment, is an impressive sight. Still, it is dwarfed by other European studio operations, like the Pinewood Studios Group, which has 34 stages in three complexes in Britain, and the Babelsberg studio near Berlin, which has 20 stages on a single site. Britain has long been the biggest European recipient of Hollywood investment. James Bond movies like the new "Skyfall" are shot at Pinewood. Two years ago, one U.S. studio, Warner Brothers, acquired its own British studio, Leavesden, where the "Harry Potter" movies were made, and pumped more than $150 million into renovating it. Pinewood wants to get even bigger. The company that runs it plans an expansion that would double its studio capacity, though its ambitions were scaled back after the government rejected a previous proposal that would have included the construction of 1,400 homes. Babelsberg, too, attracts substantial Hollywood investment and big international productions like "Anonymous," "Inglourious Basterds," "The Reader" and "The Pianist," which were all shot there in recent years.