Comedies club special Michel Blanc (3/5) – This summer, BFMTV pays tribute to the brilliant actor by telling the shooting of his cult comedies. Today, Doctor?.
Michel Blanc often said that the shooting of Doctor? had been one of the worst memories of his career. And yet, he tenderly loved this Buddy Movie in which he formed a duet with a 37 -year -old actor his youngest, Hakim Jemili, of which it is the first role in the cinema.
Released in December 2019, Doctor? Follows a doctor at the end of the roller forced to custody of Christmas with a delivery man. This comedy Feel Good, produced by Tristan Séguéla, met with a great success in theaters – nearly a million admissions – before hitting television.
In Doctor?Michel Blanc embodies a gruff character, opposite the Losers Pleurnichards who made him famous. He was very proud to finally be able to play, thanks to this film, another comic archetype. “He said it was one of the things that was most likely in this film,” comments Tristan Séguéla in our podcast Comedies Club.
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“In Walk in the shade or Come home, I live with a girlfriendhe was the Augustus. He was the one we laugh at. He was the buffoon. (Doctor?), it was his first white clown. He was very happy to know that it was not he who was going to laugh, but (Hakim Jamili) “, continues the director.
“It frozen me a little”
Michel Blanc had a real crush on Hakim Jemili. “(Before starting him, I had shown him) the filmed tests of Hakim,” recalls Tristan Séguéla. “Very quickly, I saw him giggle and sneer behind the screen. I remember that his agent had looked at me to tell me that it was going to do it.”
But before the shooting, Michel Blanc had chosen not to speak to Hakim Jemili. “It had frozen me a little,” said Tristan Séguéla. “They barely met one day in the fittings. And Michel was very cold with him. I followed that it might be complicated. But in fact, he nourished his character.” And the director to detail:
“For Michel, everything that preceded (filming) would have damaged their real meeting. I made their meeting (in the film) almost coincides with their first day of filming. The film is the story of a fortuitous meeting. He wanted it to perform in front of the camera and not during rehearsals. It was a wise choice.”
Tristan Séguéla did not feel threatened by this intervention by the actor. “I retrospectively think that it was a skillful and intelligent way to weigh on the film. And yet, it is not someone who had a desire to go beyond his function. I found him greatly respectful of the position that was mine.”
Four chicks on the stairs
Himself a screenwriter, Michel Blanc is also very respectful of the script signed Tristan Séguéla and Jim Birmant. On the set, he asks to modify only one reply. “The sentence had bothered him,” recalls the director. “It was a valve related to the news, a bit out of words.”
Michel Blanc hated improvising. “If he changed a word in the text, it had to be decided in advance.” So he rehearsed his text tirelessly, even on weekends. And when he wanted to modify a word, he called the director. “It was always very respectful. At first, he even went through his agent.”
On the first day of shooting, Michel Blanc offers a beautiful fright to the team. As he is preparing, the 66 -year -old actor falls on the stairs. “He made four tingles on the stairs. After the dread, very quickly, he got up and it seemed to go.” But the actor is hypochondriac and he begins to persuade himself that he cannot turn.
“He had an ankle pain and he thought that the shooting was not going to be able to take place, because we were going to have to put a plaster of walking,” continues the director. “We called a doctor, a real one, to examine him. We took an hour to check that everything was fine. Fortunately, he was miracle.”
“We read things in our eyes”
The shooting takes place mainly at night, which Michel Blanc most hates in the world. “At the beginning, it was fine, we held on the nerves, but very quickly, we were really exhausted because we went to bed every day at 6, 7 or 8 am. We found ourselves to chain the nights and it was completely exploded, like all of us.”
Fatigue did not affect its performance. I think it even fed him, “adds the director.” This is one of the reasons why he is so good: he is tired and fatigue hits his nerves and makes him irascible, grumpy. “
At the very beginning of filming, Michel Blanc was also affected by a personal drama, the disappearance of his father. This mourning helped him to camp his character, also a single man after the death of a loved one. “We read things in his eyes, in that slightly stretched voice. I think we have never heard it like that.”
“He didn’t say anything to me”
Michel Blanc was proud of the film but his first reaction was a bit confusing, tells us Tristan Séguéla. “He didn’t say anything to me nothing. I told myself that perhaps he didn’t like this film. But Claire, his agent, reassured me. She told me that it was always the same, that I shouldn’t worry.”
A few weeks later, during a public preview, Michel Blanc saw the film in a full room in Lille. “He feasted and he let me know it immediately after, apologizing almost to having been like that the first time, thanking me and above all telling me that he had really loved the film.”
Well received by the press, Doctor? brought together 797,236 rooms in the mouth to the ears. On television, he touched 4 million telespectors during his first broadcast. “I received a little message from Michel who said to me: ‘I never manage to review my films on TV, but I loved it. Thank you. It made me very happy. “
After filming, Michel Blanc continued to support Hakim Jemili. The two men remained close. He was even his godfather at the César. When he died, Hakim Jemili paid tribute to Instagram to the one he considered “his cinema dad”: “Thank you for everything you have done for me”.
