Thursday, January 21, 2021, TF1 broadcasts the latest episodes of its new flagship series The promise. Carried by the singer and now actress Sofia Essaïdi, Guy Lecluyse and Olivier Marchal, detective fiction keeps all its promises by occupying the head of television audiences every week. But a few hours from the end, fans continue to question the origin of the script. Is it inspired by a true story? During an interview with the site Allocine, screenwriter Anne Landois answered the question viewers have been asking themselves since the first episode aired. Thus, she revealed that while the story of The promise is not taken from real facts, however, she was inspired by the Estelle Mouzin case. Michel Fourniret ended up confessing his responsibility in 2020, fifteen years after the start of the investigation, which had long remained without serious leads.
Anne Landois also drew on her experience working for other productions. "I worked for several years on Gears, for ten years, and I worked with a lot of cops who often told me about unsuccessful investigations. And the unease that it created for them to fail ", she explained to our colleagues. Before adding: "And failure is something I never had a chance to deal with in Gears. So when we created our production company, Vassili Clert and I, I wanted to propose a plot with an investigation that does not lead. Starting from a story that has always marked me very much: the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin ".
The promise inspired by a natural disaster
It was following Storm Martin, which hit Europe at the end of 1999, that Anne Landois began writing the series.. “Everyone remembers where he was on the day of the 1999 storm, it's quite astonishing. It gave me comfort in the idea that the historical marker was strong to start an investigation. An investigation that will fail. , because everyone thinks it's related to the storm. Everything that should have been done was not done because people are concerned about something else, everyone was affected. And it is this natural devastation, and at the same time intimate, with the disappearance of this little girl, who will launch this intrigue which will never be resolved ", she concluded.
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