Richard Blaimert is one of the most prolific authors on the small screen in Quebec. We owe him successful series like Charlotte’s world, The ups and downs of Sophie Paquin, New address or more recently Cerebrum. At the dawn of sixty, the screenwriter still has the sacred fire, but the lack of means seems heavier than before. Over the years, production budgets have stagnated. The number of filming days has decreased. And inevitably, the quality of the works suffers, he regrets.
“From there to say that Quebec television is less good than before: still not. I think we’ve gotten a lot better at telling our stories since I started. We developed expertise in screenwriting that we didn’t have. But could we be better? Yes, certainly,” he said in an interview with The duty.
The screenwriter is one of those who believe that reflection is necessary on the distribution of financing. In recent years, funds allocated to Quebec production have certainly increased, but much less rapidly than the number of television projects. In 2017-2018, the Canada Media Fund supported 37 fiction programs in Quebec. Five years later, this figure rose to 65, because of the post-pandemic recovery, but also because of the emergence of platforms, which are greedy for new content.
The time has perhaps come to produce less, even if it means increasing the budgets of the most promising projects, dares to suggest Richard Blaimert, aware that not everyone will share his opinion. “We will never succeed in competing with Netflix and company. But we should at least select a few series to give them more of the means to achieve their ambitions,” argues the man who has lived in Los Angeles for around twenty years.
Atypical project
He was in Montreal this week to promote the third and final season of the police drama Cerebrum, which Tou.tv subscribers will be able to watch from July 4. For the first time this year, viewers will know from the first episode who the murderer is. “I wanted to renew the formula. But I’ve never struggled so much to write a series. It was a big challenge trying to keep the plot interesting for 10 episodes,” says the author, who talks about Cerebrum as his “most atypical project” in his career.
The development of this series has in any case been winding to say the least. Filming was postponed by the pandemic. Claude Legault, one of the main actors in the series with Christine Beaulieu, had to be replaced by François Papineau between the first and second seasons following his professional burnout. And as always, several elements of the original script had to be cut along the way due to lack of money and time.
“To do everything I wanted in the first season of Cerebrum, for example, I would have needed 82 days, whereas I was entitled to 60. That means cutting a lot of things and making difficult choices. It’s a profession of compromise. But when you’re asked to rewrite an episode, not because it’s not good, but because we don’t have the budget, it’s frustrating. In the long run, it ends up getting worse. I still love what I do, but if I retire, it will be because of that,” says Richard Blaimert, who also directed the first season of Cerebrum.
Cadillacs and young people
The increasingly limited filming time limits the number of takes. The actors almost no longer have the right to make mistakes. This sometimes results in differences in the level of play. But this reality mainly has the effect of pushing distribution agents to always hire the same actors, who we know are capable of delivering the goods.
“People complain that we always see the same faces. But if we always take the same actors, it’s because they are the best. In the trade, we call them Cadillacs. They are the Claude Legaults and Julie Le Bretons of this world. We know they’re going to be good the first time. An actor who acts less often may be stressed during the first takes. And that’s normal. But we are limited. If we take more time with an actor, it shifts the rest of the shoot,” illustrates Richard Blaimert.
For his new series, The return of Anna Brodeur, Richard Blaimert is delighted to be able to count on several of these “Cadillacs” as headliners, such as Julie Le Breton, but also Patrick Hivon, Benoît McGinnis and Élise Guilbault. Filming has started and Richard Blaimert is working these days to finalize the script for the last episodes of the first season.
He wrote this dramatic comedy, which will be broadcast on Crave in the fall, by trying to free himself from commercial considerations as much as possible, without having a target audience in mind. “It is normal that the Minister of Culture and broadcasters are concerned by the idea of Quebec television rejuvenating its audience. But for me, it’s a pressure that I don’t want to put on my shoulders. I write to entertain. And so much the better if it also reaches young people,” he reasons.
Young people’s disaffection with television has become the hot topic in the industry in recent years. Richard Blaimert wonders if we don’t worry a little too much sometimes. “They say that 30-year-olds just listen to Netflix. But me, at their age, I just listened to HBO series too. I didn’t listen to much Quebec television,” underlines the author, recognizing that Quebec television is facing enormous challenges, but refusing to fall into the ambient catastrophism.