Since mid-March, these sets have been seen on television news and the media around the world. Becoming, despite themselves, one of the symbols of containment. This Monday morning, they will illustrate the resumption of activity since the filming of the film "Adieu Monsieur Haffmann", which froze under the Occupation the streets Berthe and Androuet de Montmartre, will restart. "We were so anxious," enthuses Fred Cavayé, director of this feature film adapted from the formidable play of the four Molières. It will smile behind the masks! Like Gilles Lellouche, who had to keep his mustache, we all had half of our brains plugged into the recovery. "
When the shooting of this historic drama with Daniel Auteuil, Gilles Lellouche and Sara Giraudeau came to an abrupt halt, on the weekend of March 15, the film crew decided to leave the pedestrian crossing, the anti-Bolshevik posters behind and the facades of the second-hand dealer, the jeweler and the shoemaker installed by the decorators to plunge the district in 1942. "We had already filmed for eight weeks and we had ten days of shooting, says Fred Cavayé. If we had removed all the decorations, we would have needed two additional weeks of work on restart. "
The filmmaker of "A bout bout", "Radin! "And du" Jeu "nevertheless hastened to remove the" terrible "posters calling for the census of the Jews, as well as those posted on the stores to indicate the shops belonging to Jews. "It was unthinkable to leave them for weeks," he says. Over the past two weeks, the signs have been replaced and the rest of the decor reinstalled as it was on March 13. But the shooting will start again under completely different conditions.
"7 extras instead of 120"
This Monday morning, the perimeter of the plateau will be closed with barriers or tarpaulins, which only fifty people can cross at the same time, in accordance with the charter which now governs filming. "My technical team had to go from 70 to 35 people and I will have only 7 extras instead of 120", details Fred Cavayé. Actors and technicians who so wish will undergo a coronavirus screening test and, on site, nurses will take the temperature of each person present.
Everyone will wear a mask, except of course the actors during the takes. But between them, the actors will have to "mash up". "We therefore planned a makeup connection before each shot," says the director. The actors' hair and make-up will be done not in a collective dressing room, but in "individual" rooms, where the make-up artists can sometimes guide the actors without touching them.
Another imperative: no canteen, but meal trays served in rooms or tents that cannot accommodate more than four people. The main actors will even eat alone, each in a hotel room. Finally, no one will be able to go to the plateau by public transport: shuttles will be made available.
"All this will of course increase the production cost (Editor's note: initially planned around 11 million euros) ," explains Fred Cavayé. And we will only be able to shoot six actual hours a day instead of eight. "By the way, the filmmaker is delighted to have no" couple scene "to shoot ... And ensures that by playing with the lenses of the cameras, he will be able to respect the rules of distancing:" If two characters must walk together in the street, we will place them one meter apart and we will use a long focal length. In the image, we will have the impression that the actors are glued. "
"Sometimes constraints give birth to great things"
Delighted with the idea of finding his set, the director wants to be positive: confinement has at least enabled him to "keep thinking about the film, trying to improve it". Cavayé thus began to edit the sequences already shot and added accordingly "small transition scenes" and others, "which specify the psychology of the characters". The director also rewrote sequences in order to adapt to the health context. And he underlines that, "sometimes, in the cinema, constraints give birth to great things".
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So, instead of a dance sequence in a cabaret with sixty couples - "impossible to perform today" -, he will film characters in the street excluded from this opulent evening. "The image of these people who run into a closed door will be even stronger," he said. And the filmmaker will replace one of the two planned round-up scenes - the first has already been filmed - with images, "just as chilling", in which a character finds his neighborhood deserted, a suitcase ripped open on the sidewalk.
"Leaving the spectator to imagine is sometimes more powerful than showing things," swears Cavayé. Who recalls that if the first hour of the "Teeth of the Sea" is so terrifying, it is because we do not see the shark ... that a mechanical failure had nailed out of the water.
Other film sets are going to be deconfined
It is the first “big” film whose shooting has already restarted in Paris. Monday, May 25, Sandrine Kiberlain and François Berléand discreetly resumed the path of the stage of "We are made to get along", comedy directed by Pascal Elbé.
In the wake of this shooting, like "Adieu Monsieur Haffmann" from this Monday, other feature films interrupted by the introduction of confinement will be able to restart. Thursday, Martin Bourboulon will repeat the shots of "Eiffel", his biopic of Gustave Eiffel with Romain Duris.
On June 15, the shooting of Thomas Gilou's "Retirement home" with Kev Adams and Gérard Depardieu will start again, as will that of "Tuche 4" by Olivier Baroux. During the confinement, Jean-Paul Rouve, co-screenwriter of the latter, also declared that he had to rewrite scenes requiring too many extras to adapt to the new constraints.
In the coming weeks, many other directors, actors and technicians will return to the movie sets. At the origin of this unblocking, two announcements occurred last week: that of a compensation fund of 50 million euros, managed by the National Cinema Center to compensate the risks linked to the coronavirus (no agreement n had been found with insurance companies) and the drafting, by professional and trade union organizations of cinematographic and audiovisual production, of a 40-page guide including the sanitary rules to respect before, during and after a shooting