With all the sanitary rules to be respected on the film sets, the creators of series had to be imaginative so that the effects of the pandemic are not noticed on the screen. Some chose to form bubbles (5and rank), others, to hire couples or actors residing at the same address (Between two sheets), and still others, to make the plexiglass panels disappear during assembly (Discussions with my parents).
In some shots, you couldn’t help noticing the great distance between the actors. Remember the meetings at the restaurant of the late Poupou (Sébastien Delorme) with Labelle (Peter Miller) two or three tables apart in District 31. Wouldn’t it have been easier to put the reality of the pandemic into fiction? Certainly not, according to Michel Trudeau, founder with Fabienne Larouche of AETIOS Productions.
“None of the screenwriters we work with came up with the idea of talking about COVID-19, whether it was Luc Dionne (District 31), Danielle Trottier (All the life) or Danielle Dansereau (Reasonable doubt), says the producer. Our series were not born out of the pandemic; same Happiness and Without an appointment, which happens in the medical community, were developed before COVID. The times when there were discussions, it was on the side of the directors and the broadcasters who were wondering what we were going to do with it. »
Nevertheless, to justify the absence of an actor, the COVID can be a good excuse, in particular in a daily newspaper or an annual series: “By putting the COVID [dans le scénario], you add constraints, because it has to be like in real life, explains Michel Trudeau. I remember when we did Trauma, we realized that we couldn’t show the doctors with their masks all the time. »
The producer continues: “In the case of daily newspapers, people who are used to watching it from Monday to Thursday, from September to April, have the impression that what they are watching is contemporary with what they live and that they should find current topics there. This is not the case at all. People are experiencing the pandemic so much in their lives that it wouldn’t have been a good idea to add it in there… Especially when viewers connect so much with a series like District 31. »
Director Alexis Durand-Brault, whose company ALSO, which he runs with Sophie Lorain, gave us Portrait-robot, get me out of me and A family bond, abounds in this direction. “We were the first set to shoot in times of COVID. With Sophie Lorain and Guillaume Lespérance, we had worked a lot with Public Health to establish the new rules. We had Rémy Girard, who was 69 at the time, it was still a bit tricky. At one point, we wondered if we should represent the COVID. From the start, we said no, because we thought it was already hard enough as it was. I didn’t want to see people on screen with masks, like in the series Epidemic with Julie Le Breton, broadcast just before the pandemic. »
Beyond the masks, it is above all not to harm the intrigues that, at ALSO, we decided not to stick to reality: “I had the impression that it was going to vampirize the stories and that we were going to be forced to tell another story within the story. It was a topic of discussion for two weeks. Afterwards, we threw it overboard. »
When the pandemic broke out, Marie-Hélène Lebeau-Taschereau, director and content producer at KOTV (Plan B, eye of the storm, wildlife handbook), was co-writing Turn, a series set in the world of speed skating. “I was writing scenes that took place in an airport, in world competitions, scenes where there was sexuality. I wondered when we were going to be able to shoot this, because there was nothing more anti-pandemic than that. The Summer Olympics had been postponed, there was something quite strange. Of course, we couldn’t tackle the pandemic, because it changed everything. It was therefore necessary to find ways to achieve this and not to distort the story while respecting sanitary measures. »
In the near future ?
Very few series have evoked the omnipresence of COVID-19 in our lives, except with humor. In the last episode of Beautiful discomforts 2.0., Martin Matte gave it a funny nod. “I had a nightmare, said his character to his girlfriend (Caroline Dhavernas) when waking up. We had to shoot my series as if everyone had leprosy. »
In Happiness, François (Michel Charette) installs a mailbox in the colors of the rainbow while swearing to his family that everything will be better. As he describes distance learning to François, the school principal (Laurent Paquin) blurts out that COVID has been good.
Discreetly, the characters of the fourth season of Miscellaneous facts recalled the rules of distancing; in the background, extras wore the mask. In their new series, A criminal case, Joanne Arseneau and Stéphane Lapointe omitted the pandemic, even if the action takes place in 2021. “Fiction is a parallel world! So we didn’t play it [la pandémie] “says the screenwriter.
” In Miscellaneous facts, we had staged it, but we quickly realized that we didn’t really know what we were getting into, recalls the director. We had “paddés” by placing it in the story, but we found a lot of tricks so that it does not appear on the screen. We could have not talked about it, we decided not to talk about it in A criminal case. We like that, getting out of this reality. »
For Marie-Hélène Lebeau-Taschereau, the pandemic tinged one of the youth series she co-wrote, The pact. “As I wrote this, the young people were no longer in school, but I knew that at some point they were going to have to relearn how to be together. So I put three dissimilar young people who decide to unite for something bigger than themselves. I had the feeling that this was what we were experiencing in the face of the pandemic. How do we manage when we have different opinions to unite and learn to trust each other? These themes lived in me, but I chose not to plunge the characters into a pandemic. »
If the pandemic has been discreet on the small screen, Alexis Durand-Brault believes that it is only a postponement. “Looking back, it looks like we’re looking at another world, things look weird. Every day, we looked at the bulletin at 1 p.m., the number of dead. It was traumatic for a lot of people, but life went on and, on a dramatic level, it created interesting situations: the curfew, the empty streets, the conspiracy… I think the authors and the directors will s have a field day with this. »