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When France went into lockdown on 17 March last year, the cameras stopped turning.
“I was preparing a shoot with Raoul Peck in the Dominican Republic and they closed the border and said you have to go back to France,” recalls assistant director Laure Monrréal.
Two months of work preparing the shoot ended up in the bin.
“We lost everything, stopped everything and came back,” Monrréal tells RFI.
Like many in the industry she wondered when, if ever, they’d work again.
“At the end of the first lockdown the entire industry was afraid... it was terrible. We thought it would be very difficult to shoot with Covid. Producers told us ‘we’re going to stop everything and perhaps in March 2021 we’ll begin again'.”
Back in the saddle
The reality was a good deal brighter. By the end of May, the national film board (CNC), health authorities and cinema professionals negotiated new ways of working under Covid that enabled film shoots to pick up again.
Measures included an agreement with insurers to encourage producers to film, a Covid passport allowing foreign crews to enter France and a lengthy Covid protocol on how to minimise the risk of transmitting the virus on set.
“These measures allowed us to maintain activity in 2020,” Stephan Bender, head of Film France, tells RFI.
“I’m really happy to see that this year wasn’t as catastrophic as we feared, and France got back in the saddle. In fact there’s been more activity in film than the year before."
According to the CNC, 450 film productions have been shot since May 2020 compared with 319 in 2019.
Managing Covid-risk on set
The 46-page Covid protocol covers everything from hand sanitiser, masks and other PPE equipment, through to rewriting love and other contact scenes. In practice, there's little evidence to show directors have been demanding those kind of rewrites.
What has become the norm is having a Covid “referent” or specialist, usually a nurse or doctor, permanently on set. They check temperatures, distribute hand sanitiser and make sure masks are worn properly.
“We’re not the police, we teach them so they learn to manage the situation themselves,” says Guillaume, a former intensive care nurse who switched to working on Covid prevention last summer. The idea, he explains, is to avoid infections so the shoot can continue.
Crew and actors are required to wear masks when filming has stopped, although Monrréal says lead actors tend to avoid wearing masks because "it messes their make-up”.
Instead, they’re encouraged to get tested regularly. Guillaume’s company, Medicare Event, offers the actors a PCR test every fortnight which "99.9 percent accept".
When Covid strikes
Despite the precautions, some shoots have been stopped in their tracks. In Monrréal’s case, for three months.
She began shooting 16 ans (16 years) in October 2020 but after 18 days both the director, Philippe Loiret, and the two lead actors contracted Covid after "working with a lot of extras" for a scene shot in a school.
Loiret, 65, was taken seriously ill, and they were not able to return to the set until 20 January, 2021.
The time lapse posed challenges because the autumn shoot became a winter one, and trees had shed their leaves.
“We didn't have the continuity so we brought in some other trees,” Monrréal says. “The deco department wasn't happy.”
In the interim period, France had introduced compulsory mask-wearing in public places. Monrréal hired additional staff to block roads and stop mask-wearing people from getting into the frame.
Budget increases
Hiring more production staff, a nurse and buying masks has added to film budgets.
“Some estimates say they could have increased by more than 10 percent,” said Oliver Vergès, vice-president of AFAR, the French Association of Assistant Directors.
Despite this, Vergès says he's had "plenty of proposals" this year, especially in TV, and has just begun shooting a detective movie in Blois, central France.
Wearing a mask on set complicates the job, he says.
“This is a communications profession. Human relations are central, so giving and receiving instructions on set is harder when you wear a mask.”
Vergès says the health crisis has also frayed some nerves. "Some of my colleagues have flipped out over Covid, they were ringing up and asking for a lot of reassurance before the shoot.”
Despite the challenges Vergès says he feels "privileged" to work in the profession. "The fact we’re still able to shoot a script is great."
Playing safe with TV
The boom in TV production, boosted by online platforms like Netflix and Apple as well as French TV channels, has steered some industry professionals away from cinema altogether.
“I can’t find a good second assistant director to assist me on the new film because everybody is busy," says Monrréal.
There are also worries that the large number of films being made will compete for screen time once cinemas finally reopen.
In a recent open letter, hundreds of film industry professionals warned that unreleased feature films were piling up on distributors’ shelves.
“Distributors play a major role in financing films; they are absolutely indispensable, and I think they’ll stop financing them,” says film director Cécile Ducrocq, who has just finished shooting her first feature "Une femme du Monde".
“They’ve already got two or three films in their catalogue and they can’t release them. We’ve no idea what’s going to happen.”
Some producers have begun hedging their bets, commissioning scripts before deciding which screen they'll end up on. For screenwriter Hedi Sassi that poses a challenge.
“A fellow screenwriter and I recently signed two film projects. The producer changed the contracts saying he didn’t know whether they would be for cinema, an online platform or for TV," he tells RFI.
"They prefer to take precautions, but writing for cinema is not the same as writing for Netflix.”
While some film professionals fear the increasing popularity of TV and online platforms will threaten the very future of cinema, Sassi is sceptical. “They said traditional cinema would die with the rise of video clubs, but it didn’t happen," he says.
Monrréal is also counting on the industry’s resilience and adaptability.
“I’m optimistic. Our industry is so flexible, we can adapt to almost anything. I think we'll find solutions to save movies."
Listen to this story in the Spotlight on France podcast.
