The ambition is multiple this Monday evening on Canal+. If it is political in several of the characters of “The Fever”, it is also technical on the scale of this new series, as its director Ziad Doueiri underlines.
Nothing was left to chance. In the first episodes of The Fever, broadcast this Monday March 18 on Canal+, several scenes take place in a special room in the company specializing in crisis communications and opinion polls managed by Tristan (Xavier Robic).
A sort of control room which includes an impressive giant screen, which notably allows Sam (Nina Meurisse) to keep an eye on trends on all social networks at the same time.
An inspiration coming straight from… the SNCF!
“We were inspired by a very large giant screen that really exists. We actually went to see it with Eric [Benzekri, créateur et co-scénariste de la série]. He is in an SNCF crisis center.”remembered Ziad Doueiri, the director of Feverat a press conference last February.
“This screen helps them manage problems before we start talking about them on BFMTV. It displays in real time the messages from users who complain on social networks and allows them to immediately send a team to resolve the problem. issue”explains Ziad Doueiri.
He pursues : “This screen was designed by a company of around fifteen people, who came to help us with ours. Moreover, when the team came to the film set to discover the final result, they told us ‘Ah damn, it’s better than the real thing!’. We were very proud. We played with the graphics to stick as closely as possible to the codes of the major crisis centers”.
All the videos displayed on the screen were filmed especially for the series!
But the scenes with this impressive giant screen were not only a technological feat: they were also a technical challenge. “It was the most laborious moment of my career as a director. I have never struggled so much trying to construct a scene”, assures Ziad Doueiri. And for good reason. “We made all the images you see on the screen. We didn’t buy anything. We shot around 240 videos in the form of Instagram stories or TikToks. Eric had to hire someone to write the text for each video”recalls the director of the series.
Beyond the large quantity of videos required, shooting them proved to be a challenge for several reasons. “Already, I am very unfamiliar with the language of social networks. So I had to spend time to educate myself on this subject”, develops Ziad Doueiri. “When I showed the series to my fifteen-year-old daughter and asked her if she understood everything, she replied ‘Of course!’ She burst out laughing in front of certain videos because she masters the codes of social networks”.
“I absolutely wanted the actors to have images on screen”
The other major difficulty came from the format of the videos. “For films, we shoot in a horizontal format. However, on social networks, things are different: you take out your phone and you film vertically. So I had to learn to frame differently”, underlines Ziad Doueiri. “This may seem trivial to you, but for me, who spent my whole life in cinema, it was very difficult to succeed in thinking about a scene differently.”.
A titanic and complicated work which nevertheless seemed essential to the director of Fever. “I absolutely wanted the actors to have images on screen. I could have shot these scenes with a green screen and added the videos in post-production, it would have been much simpler and much cheaper to shoot, but I wanted to capture the reflection of the images on the characters’ skin or on their glasses”specifies the man already present on Eric Benzekri’s first political series for Canal+, Baron noir.
He adds : “By broadcasting images on the screen, the actors also did not need to anticipate anything, they reacted spontaneously to the different sequences that had been shot”.
Details which should allow us to better enjoy the next scenes with Tristan and Sam in the company premises. Following Fever can be discovered every Monday at 9 p.m. on Canal+.