He speaks in dreams, in visions of the night

The first day that I moved to Paris last year, Maciek and I spotted a huge derelict house on the hill just below the Sacre Coeur as we walked around talking about taking romantic, dramatic, violent pictures on rooftops with smoke clouds and the constant danger of falling.

After we found a huge church with intricate scaffolding and ladders up one side near to the Gare de l'Est, we planned and proposed the shoot to Vice, and then spent the following weeks scaling the church wall at two in the morning and breaking into the abandoned building on the hill, stepping over dead pigeons, whispering in the bell tower, and setting alight thick black 'fire paste' on Maciek's dining table.

I styled the shoot with Charlotte, and we spent days walking around the press offices in the 3rd arr. looking over and over for blankets and sheets to drape around the models. These are the pictures as they appeared in the magazine:








And some of mine and Maciek's references:






When we had taken all of the pictures at the end of the month we knew the way up to the roof of the church pretty well, so climbed up one last time with a giant bottle of wine we'd taken from a bar to drink looking over Paris. After that we started to climb up onto rooftops whenever we saw scaffolding in the summer, to sit in the sun and look down at other rooftops. These are some of the pictures mostly taken by Arturo of us climbing around in the weeks when we were shooting: