Hôtel Lutetia

It was word of mouth, and early on there was no keen way to check out people's credentials, which is going to take us, for the moment, back to Ryla.

the German officer who drove across France to arrive at the Hotel Lutetia in June in the spring-summer of 1940 and moved into an office and an apartment, two rooms.

One was his office, one was his living quarters.

And he was there for four years.

You can't send these people off directly on a train.

or to their families.

So they requisitioned the Hotel Lutetia once again, and the process of requisitioning it is fairly straightforward.

He happened to have been brought up in the 6th arrondissement where the Lutetia is based.

So, um, it was already artistic colony.

Uh, Hotel Lutetia is watching this happen as people come and go, and it is a stopping place on the Left Bank.

All the good hotels, uh, competitively with Lutetia are on the Right Bank.

And, uh, in time, Heinrich Mann will be there.

The first, second, third, and fourth wave of German intellectuals have fled the Weimar, which is now Nazi Germany.

It's 1935, September.

We're at Hotel Lutetia on the left bank of the, of Paris, and a man named Willi Münzenberg is organizing a meeting of a committee that has a longer name than I can remember easily.

Preparatory Committee for, uh, Preparatory, uh, German Front.

If you're doing it right, you're living that person inside of you.

I wrote a script once about the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which is where the Gestapo moved in, and they used it to torture people.

Well, when I was writing that, I had to both be the torturer and the tortured, and I can go pretty far in both directions in my imagination, and that was one of the hardest things I've ever written.

If you're doing it right, you have to accept the vision as it comes to you, and I actually don't w- write the dialogue.