The job of a director can be thankless.

If the actors can make a name for themselves, it's much harder for those behind the camera to shine.

Eric Lavaine, who has a dozen films to his credit, regularly pays the price.

So he found a way out by pretending to be someone else.

He is the director of

Barbecue, Poltergay

and 

Return to my mother's house

and has just released

Un tour chez ma fille

.

Éric Lavaine has directed ten feature films, most of which have received a positive reception from the public.

Yet people don't necessarily know his name or his filmography.

At the microphone of Europe 1, he details to Isabelle Morizet the little joke about the

Untouchables

that he sometimes makes at dinners to avoid embarrassment. 

"People don't know me"

The problem with directors, for "99% of them", is that they are not "public figures", explains Éric Lavaine.

However, as he tells it in "There is not only one life in life", on Europe 1, people do not "know" him.

"The big concern", he underlines, is that out of politeness or out of real interest, "when people introduce me, I am asked what I am doing".

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To which he replies making films, which elicits the remark "there may have been films that I have seen" and when he begins to quote, for example, 

Welcome aboard.

Barbecue, back to my mother's house

.

"There, I see that it does not react", he relates.

"And so, very quickly, I go on, I say I did the

Untouchables",

which provokes a reaction.

"They tell me: 'Oh okay, it was very good' and I'm happy."

And for good reason, the film was number 1 for nine weeks, a record.

It also made 20 million admissions in France and around 30 million abroad.

"It's very annoying" not to be recognized

Except that the film is not his.

Éric Lavaine did not make the card with Omar Sy since it is signed Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano.

The director therefore "thanks" his two colleagues for their notoriety because he explains doing it "systematically".

>> Find Isabelle Morizet's shows every weekend from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Europe 1 as well as in podcast and replay here

A joke that can work "because people don't know the minds of directors."

This little stratagem allows him to keep face because "it is very annoying to spill all of his work without it saying anything to anyone".

He believes this is in part due to the fact that he never "makes headlines" with his productions.

For this, he is not very fond of criticism.

"Me, I always reassure myself by saying: apart from the public, I do not please anyone," he says.

"I always tend to think critics don't help me."

The profession of director did not interest him

Even if he is currently thriving as a director, Eric Lavaine has long felt disinterest in this position.

He considered "on H, in particular", of which he was the

showrunner, "

that the directors were of little importance".

And this for several reasons: "It was a sitcom in public so the cameras did not have a lot of work to do and then the direction of actor, when you have Eric and Ramzy, better to let them freewheel".

"For me, the base, what was really important, is the writing and I considered the directors to be not very important elements, but I came back from it", explains Éric Lavaine.

"Now being a director helps me with the writing."