France 3 is broadcasting this Friday evening the eighth issue of
La Boîte à secrets
with Michèle Bernier, Patrick Fiori and Carla Bruni.
The show was recorded in January in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, where
20 Minutes
went to attend rehearsals.
“During the first season, we were on a rope that was just emotion.
Now we're playing with lots of strings, ”says Jean-Philippe Lemonnier, one of the producers of the program.
“Come on, we have to go! This January afternoon, the producer of
La Boîte à Secrets is
ensuring that a very busy schedule is respected. In a studio in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, he presses a choir of children who have come to surprise one of the guests of the show. Masked, they repeat the song
Pour toi, Arménie
three times, while everyone understands how to hold the microphone properly. Before them, a singer with a “rocker's heart” was doing his scales then another, for whom “the important thing is to love”, went to the set to get his hands on two songs, once. the polished and disinfected piano.
By this time, it is already 4.30 p.m. but the day is far, far from over.
The teams have been on the set since the morning and are preparing the recording scheduled to start at 7 p.m.
The producer has been on the war footing for several hours, briefing the technicians, checking that nothing is missing, making sure everything is ready for lives and playbacks.
In short, it is on them and on him that all the pressure for the smooth running of the program rests.
Eight weeks of investigation before filming
Another essential cog in the machine, Faustine Bollaert is in her dressing room when the guests repeat their surprise. If the pressure begins to rise little by little, a large part of its missions have already been accomplished upstream. “I watch a lot of the interviews that the personalities have been able to give, as in
Thé or Café
or
La Parenthèse unexpectedly
. If we ask them a lot of questions on a theme, I try to find a different angle, ”she explains to
20 Minutes
.
Faustine Bollaert is not the only one to rummage through the archives of personalities.
"There are journalists who spend their lives on the phone, going through all the books that artists have released, watching all the shows they have done," lists producer Fanchon Giorda.
In total, nearly eight weeks of investigation are necessary before the shooting, all this in order to involve a teacher, a choreographer, a singing coach, a teacher whom they particularly liked.
Of laughter and tears
The task has recently become complicated with the new version of the show which forces teams to work on group surprises. From time to time, the three small boxes that the personalities face open at the same time in order to lift the veil on one of their common points. “It could be their first job, a teenage poster… It creates a real bond between the three artists and real convivial moments,” notes Fanchon Giorda. A new mechanism whose goal is to play on the complicity between the guests and which is part of a program remodeling.
“During the first season, we were on a rope that was just emotion. Now we play with lots of strings, notes producer Jean-Philippe Lemonnier. It opens up lots of other possibilities that we didn't have the year before because we were more focused on emotion. If the first numbers were therefore very tearful, the idea is now to go from laughter to tears while not forgetting to do some vocalizations.
"We try not to draw tears to them to draw tears, not to be in the pathos", adds Faustine Bollaert. The host doesn't particularly feel like a midwife of buried emotions, the way she might be in
It Starts Today
. “I feel more like the confidante of the personalities in
The Secret Box
,” she said. I know everything, I pull the strings. It's wonderful to know about every surprise. "
During the rehearsals of the mystery guests, the three personalities who will be in the spotlight the same evening, namely Michèle Bernier, Patrick Fiori and Carla Bruni during the program broadcast this Friday, May 7 on France 3, find themselves isolated in a building in front of the studio.
If the three celebrities know that they will probably have tears in their eyes during the recording, they can always count on Faustine Bollaert and the blue box of tissues that sits to the left of her chair.
There is no doubt that it will very likely empty over the surprises of the evening.
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