As if there was a way to reconcile two vocations, one of which has always upset the other, the doctor-filmmaker Thomas Lilti continues the work of exploring the hospital world he began in 2014 with Hippocrates, learning story of a young intern at the hospital. Work which found its extension in two other feature films, Country doctor (2016) and First year (2018), then in the declination of the universe ofHippocrates for television, in 2018. Season 2 will air from Monday, April 5 on the encrypted channel, and uncompromisingly depicts a public hospital on the verge of collapse.
In March 2020, you were in the middle of filming season 2 of “Hippocrates” when confinement comes to stop everything. How did you experience this period?
I started touring on January 20th. At that time, my co-authors (Anaïs Carpita and Claude Le Pape) and I had not quite finished writing the season. In March, we are interrupted by the crisis and I am going to give a helping hand to the hospital. I wrote the last two episodes on my own, fed by what I had experienced when I returned to the hospital.
In June, we are among the first to resume filming, because there is an economic imperative: we have seventeen weeks left. It’s a production choice to have as many shooting days as possible: 127 days in all, which is a lot for eight 52-minute episodes. We are almost on a cinema beat. We don’t have any more money, but the money I have, I try to spend as much as possible on the days of filming.
Why, like in season 1, did you choose to direct all the episodes?
There is not an image that I have entrusted to someone else. I’m not control freak, but I take great pleasure in doing it, even if it is trying in a particular year like this. There is also an important factor, it is the technicality of the medical series. I’m not just going to direct episodes ofHippocrates in my life, but replacing me is not so easy because I write a lot of things the day before the shoot.
I write a lot on the set, I complete or I rewrite the “medical blah,” alone, but sometimes helped by consultants and actors. I also work a lot by mimicry with the actors, I show gestures, the actors remake them in stride. I shoot a lot, the days are very long, I exhaust everyone and I exhaust myself! But I leave a lot of freedom and from this fatigue, things are born: the stage is for me a place of research.
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