Four years after “Hors Normes”, Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache are back with their new comedy. They bring together Pio Marmaï, Noémie Merlant and Jonathan Cohen for the occasion. The latter replaced another actor at short notice.
What is it about ? Albert and Bruno are over-indebted and in the end, it is on the associative path that they take together that they come across young environmental activists. More attracted by the free beer and chips than by their arguments, they will gradually join the movement without conviction…
Musical chairs
After directing him in the series En Thérapie, Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache wanted to work with Pio Marmaï on a feature film. Opposite him, the directors imagined Alban Ivanov but the actor had to withdraw from the project for health reasons. They then turned to Jonathan Cohen to replace him. He was flattered but almost refused the project, exhausted by the filming he had just completed and the post-production of Flambeau.
“We told him that it couldn’t be more appropriate for a character nicknamed Lexo: he just had to come as is, stubble, and completely wrung out!”, explains Eric Toledano. In the end, the roles of A Difficult Year were swapped between the two actors, Pio Marmaï plays the role originally intended for Jonathan Cohen, and he plays that of Pio.
Carole Bethuel – 2022 Quad Films – Ten Cinéma – Gaumont – TF1 Films Production
A film born from a world on pause
While writing a film during confinement, Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache stopped to wonder about this world on pause, as the first reports: “What was this new world that was supposed to arrive? This world which, according to some, would no longer be the same as ours. Images emerged: the deserted streets, the curtains of closed stores, the grounded planes on the ground, all these people who applauded every evening at 8 p.m. at the windows… and other images emerged as if in contradiction with this emptiness that we were all experiencing at the time, the evocation of the overflow of our societies in permanent growth.”
Italian comedy as a model
A difficult year – which obtained the Le Club AlloCiné Aime label – marks a turning point for Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, who decided to fully embrace the influence of Italian comedy, “By using irony, satire, farce, all these elements which serve to better understand our subject so that the river is more tumultuous, with more currents and counter-currents, to jostle, disturb, overflow to describe a society in change and deconstruction.
Carole Bethuel © 2023 ADNP – TEN CINEMA – GAUMONT – TF1 FILMS PRODUCTION – QUAD+TEN
Real activists in the casting
For the demonstration scenes, the directors called on real environmental activists. “They told us: we’re doing things so that people talk about us, and you’re talking about us, so we’re up for it. We love mixed casting, actors versus non-actors, everyone has a challenge to It was funny because often these young activists even found us a little soft in satire!”remembers Olivier Nakache.
For Pio Marmaï, filming with real activists was enriching: “The intervention scenes were rehearsed and they explained their methods to us: I was curious to discover and recreate with them their “performances”, these human chains, these sittings, which are so many “artistic blocks”. Their poetic as much as political dimension touched me. I exchanged a lot with them and they were very comfortable and generous in telling us their tactics, their group rules during actions or speaking, so many things that I did not know totally.”
Filming permissions
The team encountered difficulties obtaining filming permits. “We encountered refusals almost everywhere. No shopping center agreed to recreate a Black Friday, and the airports were reluctant before we managed to negotiate with Roissy and Châteauroux”, says Eric Toledano. As for the Banque de France, it is actually a building that resembles it, that of the Climate Academy, installed in the old town hall of the 4th arrondissement of Paris.
(Re)see our interview with the directors of A Difficult Year, currently in theaters: