Laurence Arné goes behind the camera to direct her companion Dany Boon

The actress’s first feature film is a road trip with Dany Boon in the role of father of a blended family.

The Hennedricks familyin theaters on June 26, is a comedy by the tandem Dany Boon and Laurence Arné, in which a blended family seeks to mend its bonds during an unconventional road trip on the Atlantic coast.

A vacation that takes an incredible turn and turns into a disaster… but from which a music group, the Hennedricks, is born: this is the subject of Laurence Arné’s very first film as director. A “new hat” for the actress, known for her roles in Cheap! or But who killed Pamela Rose again ?

For this family comedy, she drew on her daily life, because Laurence Arné surrounded herself with her companion Dany Boon, with whom she forms a blended family in real life.

Questioned by AFP, Laurence Arné said she wanted to show another side of Dany Boon, as a sensitive and music-loving father. “He’s a funky, gentle dad, who can also get angry. I wanted to film these facets because I find him very inspiring and touching”she confides, adding that she wanted “sublimate it”.

For her part, the director reveals herself as a mother who does everything to manage everyone’s emotions. “It’s a film that talks about the mental burden of women”. “I wanted to move towards comedy, while bringing in this substantive subject.”

The Hennedricks family uses the classic codes of French comedy, but with significant added value, because the music is predominant throughout the film, with great hits from the 1980s and 1990s repeated to the sound of the cajon and the pan flute.

“I wanted to show that Justine (Editor’s note: her character) cannot mourn this nostalgia. (…) This pan flute is a bit like Peter Pan’s complex”, explains Laurence Arné. For the film, the two children, played by Ferdinand Redouloux and Jehan Renard, had to learn the instruments.

“We did an artistic residency two weeks before filming to learn music together (…) and create this family. (…) When we found ourselves on the set, there was this complicity and this experience which were very important to start the film”she says.

Filming took place from May to July 2023 on the Atlantic coast, notably in Pyla and on the island of Noirmoutier.