Louise Bernard and Solène Delinger 11:22 a.m., July 05, 2022
This Tuesday, France 2 offers its viewers to discover "Childhood friends", a creation of a new genre imagined by Sam Karmann and Catherine Winphen.
Written like a play but shot like fiction, the play plunges us into the story of two couples.
Sam Karmann says more about his project at the microphone of Europe 1.
Childhood Friends
was to be a play, performed in a hall.
But, the Covid has been there.
The public no longer had the right to come.
So, from the constraint was born a new idea: to revolutionize theatrical recording.
That is to say the fact of filming a play.
The team decided to shoot like a fiction, in a natural setting, in a guest house in the South.
And for the co-writer and co-director, Sam Karmann, it allowed for great freedom.
A "unique" decor
"Instead of confining myself to a main stage, the terrace, well I could suddenly use the bedroom, the kitchen etc... I could even have drone shots", he enthuses on Europe 1. "All of a sudden, this guest house with all these parts became a unique setting. This is where the idea of having the spectators in a theater of greenery, who looked at the main place which was the terrace, was born".
>> Find the media newspapers every morning at 9:10 a.m. on Europe 1 as well as in replay and podcast here
A play about friendship
And we see that audience on screen.
It is even finally part of the decor.
We do not find the caricatural tone of the theater but, in the writing, on the other hand, we feel that it is a play.
The replies fuse, the scenes are also long but they were not shot in one go.
It's not a sequence shot.
There were eight days of shooting with day scenes and night scenes.
It's really a mix of theater and fiction.
And for that, we had to find the right actors.
A quartet composed of Nicolas Briançon, Isabelle Gélinas, Anne Jacquemin and François Vincentelli.
"It is because this quartet there was absolutely broken both in the theatrical exercise and at the same time in the exercise of the camera that this adventure could take place", underlines Sam Karmann.
"We really needed actors who were very good and who worked hard during the three weeks of rehearsals that we had in order to then be able to arrive in the natural setting".
Sam Karmann, co-author of the play
Childhood Friends
with Catherine Wimphen and co-director with Serge Khalfon.
This first theatrical fiction is broadcast Tuesday evening at 9:10 p.m. on France 2. This play illustrates how friendship can resist or crumble over time.