'The Art of Ratatouille'

"I had always read about the famous sewers of Paris, but when we finally visited them, they weren't quite as evocative and romantic as I had imagined. So, because it's entertainment, because we wanted to do some thing that was bigger than life and caricatured, we felt the audience would respond to us taking some artistic licence and creating a grander, more Phantom of the Opera, les misérables type of sewer. We looked at images from big opera sets, along with real reference from the sewers and limestone quarries underneath Paris, and we added in a dash of influence from Piranesi, an Italian artist who did engravings of fantastic classical ruins filled with arches and grates and hanging chains. All these ideas were mixed together to create this shadowy world under Paris." Harley Jessup- Production Designer page41