Guest of “There is not only one life in life”, Frédéric Lopez, journalist and founder of the famous program “Rendez-vous en terre unknown”, confided in his relationship to the world of television. He notably returned to certain failures that may have marked his career: “I was fired several times in full success and I still haven’t understood why. I don’t know the codes and I don’t want to know. It’s true that sometimes I was a little frontal and a little direct,” he said at the microphone of Europe 1.
“You live in a psychiatric hospital”
“In my job, people often say ‘he’s crazy’ because I had a little suicidal side and I faced people who had power. And then one day, Christophe André, who knows the real psychiatric hospitals, told me ‘No you live in a psychiatric hospital'”, says the journalist.
He sums up his experience in television as follows: “the world of television is Shutter Island!”.
Unemployment and “Rendezvous in unknown land”
The journalist also returned to the creation of the program “Rendez-vous en terre unknown”. Following a period of unemployment, after being fired from a show, the presenter went through a difficult period of questioning: “For the first time in my life, I went to see a shrink. had never been there in my life when I really needed it!”.
The epiphany takes place during a session: “the shrink says to me ‘but what are the strongest moments of your life?’ And I think back to the trips I had made with my son’s mother, backpacking, backpacking. I had been to Guatemala, the Philippines. I remember the first name and the story of all the people I met. So I brought out a concept that I had written for Télé-Métropole when I was 23. At the time, no one would have ever followed me, obviously”.
But it took perseverance for Frédéric Lopez before being able to convince the management of France Télévisions of the relevance of his idea. “At the time, it was the beginning of reality TV. The concept as I presented it had no image. A star among an indigenous people, that did not speak. We could not do reality TV, France 5 is the chain of knowledge when it was not that at all, of course! So it took a lot of time”, explains Frédéric Lopez.
An initiatory journey
The show will air for the first time in prime time. “I was betting my life on a one shot, as they say. If it worked, I continued. If it didn’t work, we forgot,” explains the journalist. “Rendezvous in unknown land” is a phenomenal success. The channel maintains an “almost sacred spirit of the initiatory journey” with only two or three broadcasts per year.
More than just a show, “Rendez-vous en terre unknown” serves as a memory for humanity. “When we started the program, indigenous peoples represented 5% of the world’s population. Today, they are now 3% of the world’s population. It is very disturbing to film this”.
The presenter refuses to sell the concept to foreign television channels: “I know the world of television too well. There are no means, it goes very quickly. I suspected that they were not going to do as us with an editor who spends three months with the people before going to shoot. There was no way that these people who trusted me would see the Spaniards arrive all of a sudden! I couldn’t have slept of the night. It’s obvious that I didn’t even think, I said no”, he says.