Kad Merad and Gérard Jugnot were the guests of the show C à vous and returned to the genesis of the filming of “Choristes”, in which no one believed.
With a rating of 3.7 out of 5 according to AlloCiné spectators, the film Les Choristes was a success that we can hardly imagine today: 8.46 million admissions in France, and its original soundtrack, and its flagship title See on your waysold like hotcakes, in addition to creating singing vocations among the youngest!
While the film will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its release next March, Gérard Jugnot recalled that the film was, initially, not won.
See on your way which is one of our 5 movie songs that stay in your head all day!
Guest of the show C to youthe ex-member of Splendid returned to the complicated genesis of Christophe Barratier’s film, which today remains his second biggest success after Les Bronzés 3 and its 10 million admissions:
Pathé
(…) The film got off to a very bad start: there was a heatwave, there were strikes, we changed actors who were no longer able to perform… it was a disaster. And then gradually, it transformed, it was Christophe’s first film.
The actor-director then explained that he felt that the film was going to take on a different dimension than what he had initially imagined:
“I say [à Barratier] : ‘Yes, let’s do that’, it’s a small film, we had difficulty putting it together, but nevertheless gradually, there were things… I ended up with little Maunier who was singing and I said to myself… I had a little hair, that could [marcher].
And I was told afterwards that there were 5 million people singing in choirs, and the ‘singing together’ aspect, the choir, makes people vibrate at the same time. We could really use that right now.”
Kad Merad didn’t believe it!
Still on the set of C à vous, Kad Merad, during a previous broadcast, admitted that on paper, he did not believe at all in the film, in which he plays the boarding school sports teacher:
Pathé
“[Barratier] talks to me about adapting a Christmas film ‘La Cage aux rossignols’. I said to him: ‘But wait, Christophe… how are you going to do it? In rap, something a little modern?’ No, no, I want to do it [d’époque]. And he offered me this role which was small at the beginning and which he made evolve.”
Indeed, Les Choristes is a remake, sometimes down to the last shot, the proof!
It was Jugnot himself who received me the first time and as obviously I didn’t do cinema, it was he who “drifted” me a little. I also thank Gérard Jugnot. We do it but I don’t believe in this film! Still: choirs are over! And it has become a social phenomenon.
Let’s remember that in 2002, Kad Merad was above all “Kad and Olivier”, a comedy duo born on the radio with Olivier Baroux which then exploded on Comédie! with The Big Show. A year before Les Choristes, Merad was the star of But who killed Pamela Rose?, directed by Eric Lartigau, but it was with Les Choristes that he showed that he was capable of playing on registers other than comedy .
Pathé
Jean Baptiste Maunier
The film notably revealed Jean-Baptiste Maunier, who played Morange, the soloist of the choir, recently seen in Classico by Nathanaël Guedj and Adrien Piquet-Gauthier and currently in the soap opera Tomorrow belongs to us for a very different role.
Gérard Jugnot will be appearing on November 15 in “Comme parmagique” in which he is once again starring for Christophe Barratier: