In Marseille, a lot of emotion for the last filming of the cult series “Plus belle la vie”

“I absolutely wanted to be part of the last comma“adventure, says Clément Cescau, member of the post-production team, from his editing office, above the large studio which hosts the emblematic Marseille bar of the Mistral where the main characters of the series meet. He is in charge of finishing the visual editing of the last episode aired in “prime time”.After a while, the series intertwines with everyone’s life“, says the man who met his wife there, a costume designer, during the twelve years of companionship with More beautiful life.

“At the end, it brings enormous pride, both of what the series has become, of what we have done and of what the project has raised in terms of societal issues”, affirms Clément Cescau, referring to the homosexual characters very early represented as well as to the various discriminations approached over the course of the episodes. This popular series brought together up to six million viewers on certain evenings in 2008.

“I wanted to say goodbye to the team, as a director“, testifies for her part Claire de La Rochefoucauld, 50, returned exceptionally behind the camera for the last scene of “historical” characters, Blanche and François Marci, interpreted by Cécilia Hornus and Thierry Ragueneau. The one who was director of episodes for fourteen years took on the role of producer in 2022 to take charge of this moment in particular “hard“from the end of the series and”accompany emotionally” the teams, “his family from here“, she explains.

Each day, the editing teams produced a 26-minute episode, which imposed on them a very sustained pace that was out of all proportion to the rhythms of non-daily series and cinema. “We have to move on, I know it, but it’s still sad, it’s a nice series, a nice team“, regrets for her part Carole Bourrelly, one of the three hairdressers taking care of the actors every day alongside the dressers and make-up artists. After ten years of running a hairdressing school in the temple of Bollywood cinema, in India, the Marseillaise 51 years old began at More beautiful life in 2018.

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“When you arrive, it’s like stepping into a moving TGV“, explains the one who does ten to twelve people a day in one of the white rooms with sofas and mirrors where the actors wait before joining the shoots.It’s a great school that teaches efficiency“, adds Claire de La Rochefoucauld in one of the six studios dedicated to the series: “to direct an actor, instead of saying four sentences, you learn to say a word, because you have to go fast“.

Nearly 600 people worked each year for the series and 3232 actors in all, to which must be added the extras, took part in the filming, an important economic contribution for Marseille, a city whose series “foiled a number of negative images“, underlined in the spring the president of the Tourist Office Marc Thépot.

Claire de La Rochefoucauld expresses the wish that “this family forms a network“to continue to work together and”that in Marseille, there is no mess with the teams“.”It is up to them to renew themselves and preserve the links over time.“, she believes.