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The transcript of an interview followed by group discussion with Harold Valentin, producer of Dix pour cent (Mother Production), and Christian Baute, producer of its British remake, Ten Percent (Headline Pictures), that took place on Saturday 11 September 2021 as part of the bilingual online workshop ‘Global Gallicisms II: Circulating Frenchness Through Mainstream Film and Television’ (10–11 September 2021). The event was organised and chaired by Kira Kitsopanidou with Olivier Thévenin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle).

Transcribed and translated by Mary Harrod.

Kira Kitsopanidou—I’m delighted to be chairing this round table offering more industrial perspectives on Dix pour cent: a series that was national, then international, then again national, as Christian put it to me in an earlier exchange about its many lives. I’m delighted to welcome, with our warm thanks, Harold Valentin, who was Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1997 and 2002, before taking charge of fiction for France 2, where he was responsible for such successful series as Fais pas ci, fais pas ça, and who then went on to found a production company with Aurélien Larger, Mother Production, who are behind several series to have had great audience impact—notably Dix pour cent but also La Garçonne and feature films such as Lou! and Garçon chiffon. He’s also a founding member of the 50/50 Collective supporting equality and diversity in cinema and audiovisual production. Christian Baute, the ‘man behind’ the British adaptation, is originally German, has worked in cinema and audiovisual production and distribution for 20 years, in international sales, and before joining the firm Headline in 2010 he was Senior Vice President of Distribution and Acquisitions at Celluloid Dreams, which some of you will be familiar with as an international company. He produced the US remake of Haneke’s Funny Games and also The Mourning Forest by Naomi Kawase, which received the Grand Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. At Headline Pictures, he has produced The Man in the High Castle, Quartet, The Invisible Woman and Peter and Wendy, which was a winner at the Emmy Awards. He’s also worked at the Canadian National Film Board and other organisations too numerous to list but notably he has held the role of Vice President of Independent Producers in France. Thank you both. My first questions will be for Harold. Who had the idea for the project or how did it come about? I’m interested in particular in the encounter between two rather different companies, Mon Voisin on one side, a firm wholly associated with cinema, and Mother Production, which has a more diverse background but is more associated with the wider audiovisual context. Thinking about collaboration in artistic terms, we also see on the one hand the televisual sector, with Fanny Herrero, a screenwriter and director of prestigious series, especially on Netflix at the moment, and on the other, a highly ‘cinematic’ director, Cédric Klapisch, who took part in the shoot with his own team. So how did the series get made in such circumstances?

Harold Valentin—Thanks and hello to everyone. So, on the project’s origins, it was Dominique Besnehard, who was an agent for 20 years to stars like Sophie Marceau, Béatrice Dalle and many others, then left the agency Art Media in 2005, who had the idea. He tried to develop it with Canal+ but in the 2000s in France there were still very few modern series and people with cinema backgrounds had a development model that was very ill-suited to serial production. Namely, Canal+ received a screenplay every six to eight months and they asked the producers to be present almost every day during the project’s development so the author could preserve their voice by interfacing with the buyer or buyers, in order to to retain the series’s integrity. Canal+ had ended the series and I’d spent five years at France 2, had started my production company and knew the writer behind Dix pour cent well, so I told Dominique I thought French audiences were broadly ready for more sophisticated series than before—in 2000 channels were still promoting identificatory heroes in whom audiences could recognise themselves and I was really convinced from my experience with Anglo-Saxon, Israeli and Scandinavian projects that what was important was just having interesting examples of humanity on screen, and that that’s what’s engaging. At that time there was just one writer, Nicolas Mercier, so we quickly went to France 2. They hesitated for a long time because it was more of a cable TV series that we wanted to offer to the major French public broadcast channel, where you need between 4 and 6 million viewers. I was convinced people can get excited about a Cornish fishing village if the writing’s good and there’s real humanity there.

We developed the series for three years. It was complicated, in the first place because the original writer left—I think he wanted to make his feature film—and I’d put together a team of writers, including Fanny Herrero, who was quite excited about it, but we took a good 18 months to find the series’s essence. France 2 was at once behind the series and quite hesitant. We had a great Programmes Adviser, Fanny Rondeau, who really believed in it, but above, the people on the board of France 2 all said: ‘10 per cent is the audience share you’ll get!’ You need 20 per cent on France 2. We put together a team around Fanny made up of 80 per cent women and that tells you something about the narration of the series and how the characters are constructed. We spent 18 months finding the essence, because what was missing was a dynamic linking ‘upstairs and downstairs’. It was the versatile device of Mathias’s secret daughter Camille that allowed us to create this link, and so to create intimacy in this professional world, because we realised while developing the series that whenever we had purely professional scenes it was boring. You always needed personal issues to upset the agents’ work situations—and Fanny and I are fascinated by neuroses and getting really into the characters. We also had a psychoanalyst who’d worked on cinema look at the scripts to give the characters real psychological depth—for example, the rather sado-masochistic couple formed by Mathias and Noémie. In addition, I have quite a strong English cultural background as my mother was raised in England, and during the Canal+ period there was a crime thriller thread in the series. Meanwhile, Andréa hadn’t come out as a lesbian and Sofia’s problem was being Black. But pretty quickly I pointed out that we were in the 1990s and there were plenty of coming-out stories, plus in the world we were depicting characters’ gayness isn’t a story in itself, so Andréa’s story had to be one of love. As for Sofia, her issue should be insecurity. So we completely changed the series’s essence. We got rid of the crime plot, an investigation into Samuel’s death, which was totally uninteresting and didn’t fit with the series (at the time—and still sometimes, though less often—channels demanded crime or thriller subplots to add tension because they were afraid of bland storytelling). And so Fanny Herrero, who’d written the best of the three episodes so far, took the lead again, implementing everything I’ve just said. Fanny and I saw each other every couple of days, she practically lived by my desk. We must have done 15 or 20 versions of every script for the first season—not least because then Cédric Klapisch arrived with his former assistants Lola Doillon and Antoine Garceau, with whom he wanted to co-direct, and when we started getting the guest actors—which mainly fell to Dominique Besnehard and Cédric Klapisch—we noticed that there was a bit less openness to self-mockery with French stars than in Britain (just look at Extras, which goes quite far with its guests, whereas we had trouble convincing ours). There was even an actress whom we invited to do Episode 4, someone quite well known, who called Cédric Klapisch and said that not only would she not do it but he shouldn’t either! So it was a slightly precarious moment: France 2 said to us either we should stop or we could avoid using actors’ real names, but this was too far away from our vision.

The stalemate finally ended thanks to Cécile de France. The first episode is about an actress getting older and we were really struggling to find the guest star, then Cécile—who’s Belgian, so perhaps less worried on that front, or in any case found it funny and trusted Cédric—came on board. After that it really was a marriage, as you were saying, between cinema and series cultures. Cédric had never really shared power on his films and at that time in France, once series went into production, the writers were sidelined. I didn’t want to do that, so Fanny came to all the meetings (casting, sets and so on) and we often had to do rewrites for the guest stars because they would change their minds, maybe saying no to one episode then yes to a different one; and the thing about the series is that the best episodes are those that play with professional and personal life but also public and private images, when the guests stars would agree to get a bit more involved in the plot, as with Monica Bellucci or Isabelle Huppert. These episodes have more flavour because of course it’s all made up but they play with aspects of the guest stars’ real personalities. And in fact having such trouble with the guest performers meant Cédric also got involved in rewriting episodes, especially the first and third ones, and Fanny, who was beginning to be more widely recognised as the series’s true creator, found this difficult. I was rather stuck in the middle, negotiating between their different rewrites and with France 2, who, for instance, said after the first few days of shooting, ‘Harold, it’s not as funny as on the page.’ I said, ‘Yes, but it’s more real.’ It was really important to Cédric that it should stay real and plausible in terms of what characters were going through—prioritising authenticity over contrived humour was really a joint decision he and I took. I’d done Fais pas ci, fais pas ça before and people said during the first season of that series they were worried when it wasn’t funny that they weren’t fully engaged with the characters’ emotions, so we were convinced you really needed this engagement and only then you could laugh at the comic aspects.

To complete this process, when it came to the moment of casting the show, things went really positively because we had Cédric Klapisch, and because at that time French film actors weren’t keen to work on series, especially for France 2 (as opposed to Canal+), but Klapisch’s name attracted them—that and the writing quality, of course—and we were lucky that because we had very well-known stars on board we were free and indeed we needed to choose lesser known actors for the regular cast. Apart from Camille Cottin, none of them were known. Casting took a long time, we did a lot of callbacks to find the ‘family’. We found Laure Calamy for Noémie via Dominique Besnehard through her cinema background—we wanted someone a bit more down-to-earth in this rather arty milieu. With Nicolas Maury, Cédric Klapisch and Fanny Herrero wanted a very straight gay guy but I said to them, ‘Look, we aren’t coming up with anyone, and we’ve had very masculine gay characters for 15 years. I love Ugly Betty, we could have some fun with a feminine character with a certain literary quality to him like Nicolas Maury—also because of follophobie, which is the tendency for camp gay men to be scorned nowadays, which I thought would be interesting to explore. It was similar for Sofia’s character: at first the hairdresser wanted to straighten her hair and we said no, we want an Angela Davis—in other words, to go for an idea of self-affirmation that was already becoming fashionable rather than to use the characters to suggest gay people are just like straight people (or else have issues with coming out); we wanted to get beyond those narratives and instead promote each character’s individuality.

Kira Kitsopanidou—You’ve slightly anticipated my next question about the guest stars. So this play on public and private image via self-mockery is right at the heart of the show, but did Netflix, when it bought the series as one of its ‘original’ creations, as the phrase now goes, have a view on the choice of stars? Specifically, were you forced to internationalise their profiles and did the profile as such become more important than just the idea of self-mockery?

Harold Valentin—Yes and no. Yes in the sense that—well, first of all Netflix got interested in the project very early; they’d already expressed an interest when it was in development at France 2. We stayed with France 2. From Season 2 on—well, the first season wasn’t a huge success on Netflix, but little by little it caught on and what they told us was that the audience doubled each season, and then for the fourth season I think it multiplied exponentially. So there’s something that still wasn’t in place for the second season. But its success (including lots of prizes) lay in a modernity that hadn’t been seen before in contemporary French comedy series for a long time […] and so the guest stars had begun to get it and many more were willing to work with us by the second season. Furthermore, there’s no doubt that for someone like Isabelle Huppert, who travels a lot and spends time in New York, the fact that her American and British friends were speaking to her about the show influenced her decision to take part. Sigourney Weaver agreed in the space of a day thanks to the Netflix success. What’s more striking is that I think there was also a certain complementarity, or feedback loop, where people who don’t watch much France 2 but do watch Netflix would watch Dix pour cent on France 2 when the new season came out; so Netflix’s role as secondary distributor had a really positive effect.

Kira Kitsopanidou—So the series has been very successful internationally and this international success catalysed the participation of certain French guest stars known abroad. We’ve mentioned Netflix but there’s also the sale of the format adaptation rights to the UK—and in a moment we’ll ask Christian how that came about—but the show’s also been adapted in Italy, Spain and also Turkey. Meanwhile, Camille Cottin is becoming an international star in her own right, working in Britain and Hollywood. What do you think is behind Dix pour cent’s international success and has this ultimately changed international audiences’ ideas about French televisual fiction?

Harold Valentin—On the question of the series’s success, it’s hard to say because when we first showed Season 1 in London, people said the stars were unknown. They understood what kind of stars they were, and Audrey Fleurot was a bit familiar from Engrenages, but Nathalie Baye and Cécile de France were completely unknown, so that wasn’t the hook. It was an office comedy, which is pretty universal. And it plays with something that exists in every country, that is, people who seem to have more than other people but who actually have lives much like everyone else’s, except that if they cheat on their boyfriend, it’s in all the papers, or if their daughter’s ill, the same thing happens. The price of celebrity and the stars’ enduring humanity is recognisable everywhere—every nation has its demigods and newspapers that mock celebrities to show that for all they seem to have it all, they have the same problems as everyone else: they put on weight, people cheat on them and so on. That was very contemporary. Lastly, the New Yorker said that Dix pour cent had no cynicism to it, and I think that earlier series about the showbiz world such as Entourage or Extras were either cynical or else leant towards absurdity, whereas we had a certain human truth that resonated with people. I think the writers managed to infuse something quite contemporary and modern by showing the conflict and link between ambition, or commerce, and art. The series affirms the importance of such links and of art in general—of there being more to life than just material success, that other things also count. Then of course Paris has a very strong image, and from the outset, knowing Cédric Klapisch has a lot of experience shooting Paris, we wanted to give a view of the city that’s less often seen: one that’s not Emily in Paris, despite preserving some glamour. Different sorts of ingredients like these drew audiences—plus I think the quality of the writing and the filming. We used directors from cinema throughout—this was important for the French guest stars. Everything’s changing completely now on that front, but ten years ago that was still true overall. That’s what I think makes the show travel.

Kira Kitsopanidou—I think Olivier has a question here.

Olivier Thévenin—Yes, I have a sociological question about measuring the series’s success. You’ve talked about the audience for France Télévisions, for which figures are readily available, but how do you conceive the indicative context for measuring the series’s influence using data that’s in a sense hybrid, and especially how do you compare this with figures from non-French contexts about its influence elsewhere? With apologies for a rather technical question!

Harold Valentin—Not at all: you’re quite right to ask it because Netflix has rights for a limited period, then they keep renewing them so they avoid giving us viewing figures, something I’d never experienced. It will also change as institutions develop tools for measuring the amount of time people spend watching particular programmes rather than simply focusing on the 2-minute and 75-minute viewing marks, as Netflix does. I’m very good friends with Rebecca Zlotowski, who made the film Une fille facile with Zahia [Dehar] that was in the top 10 internationally for a month, but she told me Netflix put an image on their menu of Zahia half-naked with the title An Easy Girl so people clicked on it but then saw it was a French film and doubtless stopped watching after 2 minutes! So there’s an asymmetry in the data that has to change and sooner or later will do. With us, they just said the audience was doubling each season and this was further confirmed by our personal networks: we had Grégory Montel filming in the Czech Republic telling us that there were huge crowds of people outside his hotel, and Camille Cottin that every time she went out in London she was being stopped by people, so we could see the series’s impact but only via these weak indicators. In sum, we had extraordinarily little information.

Kira Kitsopanidou—Aude Albano [Head of Series at Pathé] was telling us just now that the series Versailles has really changed other nations’ ideas about French audiovisual fiction. Do you think Dix pour cent has also, though in a very different way, changed international audiences’ view of French fiction of this sort, and does the series’s international success tell us something about French fiction’s ability to internationalise itself?

Harold Valentin—I’d say Dix pour cent is a lot more French than Versailles, which was written by British people and often featured British actors as well, making it to my mind more of a hybrid product. People told us that they felt Dix pour cent’s worldview was very French, and it’s true, for example, that the couple dynamics in France and the USA are different; the issue of being faithful to your partner’s not the same. I had a [US] colleague say to me that the idea of having sex at work seemed completely impossible to them, whereas we chose to do a love scene at work because we needed to shoot as much of the series as possible at the office for economic reasons and it’s less forbidden in France; but in any case, there’s something that seems to them very French and at the same time modern. Because previously there had been a stiffness to French fiction, while here the writers really worked to show characters’ inner lives, the workings of their unconscious, their self-destructive side and also the strong ties binding them together. The team worked to produce writing good enough to compete with those British, US and Scandinavian series we all love, and that was quite new. It came from the fact that the screenwriters who worked on Dix pour cent are screenwriters who retrained themselves in writing drama by watching UK and US series and dissecting them, as there were no or very few serial screenwriting courses in France. I did a job for the La Fémis film school in 2011 to help them initiate a section dedicated to televisual series production and I was amazed to discover that at that time—it’s changed a bit since—over a four-year course they had only six weeks’ training in writing drama. The Nouveau Roman and the Nouvelle Vague ruptured the intergenerational transmission of France’s storytelling tradition, which was very strong in the 1960s and 1970s and earlier, and this generation has rediscovered that thread, learning on the fly together. Since then, we’ve started having the elements needed to make good series descended from literary antecedents.

Kira Kitsopanidou—We’ve spoken a lot about the original series so now I’d like to invite Christian to join the discussion and tell us about the genesis of the British adaptation, as the filming will be finished in just a few weeks, so we’re looking forward to seeing the results. And then we’ll talk about what’s endured, in other words the place of the French Dix pour cent in the adaptation.

Christian Baute—The project came into existence one day after I’d been cooking at home in London and watching [Dix pour cent] […] a distributor at TF1 had sent me a link so I watched it and was captivated.

Harold Valentin—We had various remake propositions on the table at the time but Christian’s proposal was the strongest in creative terms, with real thought put into which writers should be involved. Some Americans had come with proposals but they were very vague about how to take ownership of their version, whereas Christian had already thought about this. We found that much more exciting.

Christian Baute [in English at the chair’s encouragement]—I watched it while it was being broadcast in France and I was amazed by it. I wasn’t sure if I was amazed because I knew these stories—as Harold mentioned, the series is inspired by authentic stories and people who exist, like us, some of whom I knew because I’d worked in France before. So I was asking friends who have no clue about this business—what we call ‘inside baseball’—whether they liked it too. They were as surprised as I was and so I thought, there’s something about it, and I think what Harold was saying is absolutely true: the key thing is that it’s about people like us who have neuroses and so on, who try to do something together, and more or less they achieve something together. They can’t do it alone but when they work together they get it done. That’s something really different to other shows ‘inside baseball’ that we might quote in this case—Entourage is very cynical, it’s all about back-stabbing. Of course there’s a lot of back-stabbing in the French series and there will be in the English series too. But the awareness that that doesn’t work is always what makes this the greater moment—recognising the greater good. And so then we negotiated the rights, which took some time, obviously. We also knew that there were some competitors so we quickly proposed to involve Harold and Dominique and the two French companies in the remake, and the first intuition that I had for writing and showrunning it was a man called John Morton, who was then writing the second season of a show called W1A. W1A is the postcode of the BBC, Old Broadcasting House, next to Oxford Circus, and he was doing a mockumentary based in the BBC headquarters. He took a character that he created in 2012, played by Hugh Bonneville; in 2012 that character was preparing the Olympic Games in London and because he was successful he got a mission on W1A to reform the BBC, which is of course an impossible endeavour. That show went on for four seasons I think, so John wasn’t available. TV is a long-haul business: first we hired another writer, who unfortunately failed at writing it properly, making it a comedy and not a drama any more. Then John finally became available and we made the show with him.

Kira Kitsopanidou—So the series has been in development for two or three years and will be broadcast in a few months, I guess?

Christian Baute [returning to French from now on]—I think it’ll be in February or March.

Kira Kitsopanidou—Well, there’s a lot of expectation and I’m obviously not going to ask you to reveal what’s in the adaptation, but with your overall vision of the series, do you think some of Dix pour cent’s French essence has endured or is it an adaptation for the British context that adds to or rearranges the original ingredients?

Christian Baute—Both. It’s a hybrid in more than one sense. Firstly, because we’re very worried about being compared to the original. We want to do something different as we often ask ourselves: why remake it? And I think at least we can say Britain doesn’t really have a remake tradition, unlike the USA. For a long time there’s been resistance to doing remakes because it’s a bit like the French with champagne or wine, there’s an attitude that says just as we’re not going to tell the French how to make wine, we’re not going to tell the British how to do series—it’s a long tradition there, as Harold was saying, going back as far as the 1970s with Granada TV, or maybe even earlier. And the Commissioning Editor in Britain doesn’t acquire formats. So within one channel’s different silos you have Acquisitions, who might buy formats but that’s usually focused on non-scripted [material] and shows like Britain’s Got Talent, and in Programming they’re all typically Oxbridge-educated and focused on scripts. So the first problem I had was to get the programmers to look at anything because they’re so focused on the screenplay that they’re not open to watching a finished product. We had put the links on Vimeo [website], where you can see if people have watched something. They hadn’t, because they wanted to see a screenplay. I thought it would be easy to remake this series but it wasn’t at all—in fact it was longer than three years, we started working on the project in 2016, which dates it a bit. So there was this problem and then the issue of comparison, of how to distinguish ourselves. Of course, we wanted to take the good parts of Dix pour cent, of which there are many, but also to improve on it. The bar’s very high! We adapted. The basic ingredients were the family of agents but we’ve made the cast bigger, which isn’t easy, inventing a different situation that explains the challenge facing the audience, that is, the disappearance of the founder. I think this is more central in our series; even if he disappears after the first hour, his shadow’s present for a lot longer. We also created two or three more characters who are very important. We were really exercised about how to find someone with a presence comparable to Camille Cottin’s, and we knew that the writing needed to prevent people from making this comparison, as no actress is going to want to be compared to her, so it’s true that that character is written differently—with the same ingredients (she’s bi etc.) but she’s a lot franker and less cerebral, I’d say, and so we also had to adapt the contents for the British context as one that’s much in demand in the USA. The idea of ‘two countries divided by the same language’ is very important in the adaptation as there are obviously lots of Americans in London. Filming it right now, we’ve found out there are 25 other series shooting at the same time and most of them are American. The development was in fact also done in conjunction with a new US studio, which contributes to the adaptation’s hybridity; we had to finance this and it’s expensive—Headline is a little independent organisation. No English channel wanted to step up as a partner, I think because of this cultural resistance to making remakes—I think there have only been a handful of British ones done in the past decade. At the same time, I think that will change in Britain, if we’re lucky enough for our series to be successful.

Harold Valentin—Something else I’ve discovered about Britain, after being raised on British films that mix comedy and drama, is that in contrast British TV channels’ commissioners did either drama or comedy. The notion of ‘dramedy’ that was very British to me had stopped being British!

Christian Baute—Another obstacle that in my view is bigger in Britain than elsewhere is captured by this expression ‘inside baseball’, even if it’s American. In other words, there’s some unwritten rule that Commissioning Editors never show ‘our world’, whereas if you look at the most successful HBO series, they do just that. Yet the British press thrives on celebrity gossip! So I don’t really know why it is, but I suspect it’s something to do with class—some idea of closing ranks and not allowing people to see inside. I was just saying that Commissioning Editors are mostly Oxbridge: it’s almost scandalous! There’s a rather snobbish idea of never exhibiting this milieu. Also, when it comes to the actors and second-degree humour, I’m not sure I agree with Harold as I found it very difficult to get British actors to laugh at themselves at all!

Kira Kitsopanidou—As the discussion’s covered a lot of ground, I propose to open the floor to questions from the audience.

Mary Harrod—I was interested by Harold’s statements about cultural translation in the Anglophone context—for instance, sex in the office being an alien idea to Americans—and Christian’s comment about Cottin’s character becoming more forthright in the adaptation, and whether this was merely a coincidence. My key question along these lines for Christian is, were there other aspects of Dix pour cent you thought wouldn’t work at all in a British version?

Christian Baute—Not exactly, but I recall that with our first writer we did ask the question of whether it was possible for Mathias to exist in Britain, with an illegitimate daughter about whose existence he hasn’t told his wife, and we said that of course it’s possible and that’s what we ended up doing. Then I think the debate about diversity and what we used to call BAME is more advanced in the UK thanks to the US influence, so we thought a lot about that during development, how to advance this idea. This was also because we had a US partner who was even further on in this debate because it is in his milieu, and also because the diverse talent pool’s bigger in the USA (leaving aside certain blind spots like the way that Asian never counts as ‘diverse’ there).

Harold Valentin—I’d also say that the way French people speak to each other is more straightforward, including more aggression and confrontation.

Christian Baute—Yes! The ‘stiff upper lip’ British thing really comes into the adaptation. In fact it’s one of our key motors and John Morton has a very particular skill here, which is one of the reasons we chose him: his comedy often comes from conversations at crossed purposes, if you’ve ever seen W1A—they don’t listen to each other, finish their sentences or even sometimes words. He’s really observed that closely, a bit like the novel The Employees, where you wonder how on earth people get anything done when they communicate so badly. Many of these situations of misunderstanding come from this idea of ‘you know what I mean’ you find in the world of structured communication, when in fact nobody understands anything.

Raphaëlle Moine—My question is also for Christian. I wanted to ask about a detail of the market targeted by the remake. Are you mainly targeting British audiences or are you after more international ones, via a British flavour (albeit based on a French source text)?

Christian Baute—We’re targeting a British and US public because Amazon and AMC are our partners. AMC came in at the start of shooting, so we didn’t know at the writing stage. Still, of course we knew there’s a big market for British series in the USA and we conceived a whole story strand about Americans turning up and being viewed with suspicion by the Brits. At the same time, there’s a certain duplicity because the British industry needs the US money. I’ve forgotten the exact amount announced by the Culture Secretary the other day, but film and TV in the UK is a multibillion-dollar business and if I said just now there are 25 series shooting at the same time in London, that tells you how important this business is to the British economy. There’s another double-edged sword here: we’ve really created an inflated production bubble in the UK where very, very young people straight out of screenwriting school can become story producers for Netflix and so on and be paid incredible sums. Overall, that’s good for the industry now but I’m not sure it will work long term, as it’s unsustainable—plus there aren’t enough people for that. It’s partly the Brexit effect but we had trouble finding technicians […] that’s another story, though. But the two markets we had in mind were Great Britain and North America. Australia comes along with the UK as they almost always watch the same stuff. We would like the adaptation to travel and maybe even come back to France, but who knows.

Harold Valentin—I think there are enough differences for people to want to see it because Dix pour cent is also a series about a culture common to all countries. What Christian said about the links between the US industry and the UK in terms of the culture around modes of production is also really interesting as it’s something we don’t have in the same way in France because language is a barrier.

Kira Kitsopanidou—We could cite the example of En thérapie and In Therapy, which is a bit different, but it shows that people can consume both [original and remake].

Geneviève Sellier—My question is for Harold. I was struck by what you said about screenwriters. You pointed out that self-training happened within a team dominated by women; I speculate that women are generally more open to throwing themselves into work like this. But do you think that Dix pour cent’s success could influence the economic and cultural status of screenwriters in France? This is a structural problem, as they’re very badly paid. It’s really striking that it’s one of the first series where you really feel that the screenwriters are taking the characters seriously.

Harold Valentin—This change is in motion. French screenwriters aren’t so badly paid as all that, since there’s the screenwriting fee but also exploitation rights, which is about 40 per cent of what the producers pay with the big channels. For a long time the issue’s been the [lack of] training. When you talk about showrunning in the US model, you’re talking about people who know how to write and be on a set, talk to actors, talk to directors, be in the editing suite […] At the moment our screenwriters have no experience of sets, and secondly they have this American dream but sometimes little awareness of the way in which a series is really the product of multiple creative influences. Of course there are geniuses like Eric Rochant or Jacques Audiard who could make series, as they’re both brilliant writers and brilliant directors, and Fanny Herrero grew up here and now she’s showrunning for Netflix, which is great, but the tension between Cédric Klapisch and Fanny Herrero came from the fact that although she’s an actress so she had experience of performing, sometimes writers are so attached to their scripts that when actors make these their own along the same lines but with slight differences, they only see what’s missing and not what’s there. Totally mastering your subject’s impossible anyway, you have to feel the truth of what’s going on and that happens with training and experience. So on all our shows the writers are allowed to be on set. They don’t talk to the actors but they can talk to the director as much as they like, as they need to learn and to have the chance to move towards becoming showrunners once they’re able—if they want, that is, as some aren’t interested (I recall [producer] Richard Brown on True Detective telling me about the conflict between [series creator Nic] Pizzolatto and other creative personnel and how he was stuck in the middle, like me between Fanny and Cédric, and that in the end HBO gave Pizzolatto full control over the second season, and as a result it was less good). So as a producer I’d love to find screenwriters with enough experience to have all the skills in place for showrunning. This comes gradually with experience. There’s been very little training. La Fémis did a little bit because they have the means to expose screenwriters to direction and shooting, as well as editing, which is absolutely essential, although screenwriters are generally good editors as they feel the thing; it’s on the shoot that there can be problems. So that movement’s in motion and it’s just as well.

Anne Kaftal—I have a question for Harold and one for Christian. For Harold, yesterday we were talking about the way in which Camille Cottin is anchored in a typically French context, thanks especially to her use of language and way of expressing herself. I wondered, therefore, whether you have any sense of what allowed the series to work as a comedy outside the Francophone world? Which brings me to my second question for Christian. I wanted to know how this issue of adapting humour was handled in the remake process. Did you aim for British humour or instead to create some sort of hybrid comedy including French elements?

Christian Baute—I really think that the series we’ve made is a bit less funny. There are moments [in the original]—to cite an obvious example, the scenes with Cécile de France on the horse are very funny, almost in the style of Buster Keaton, and they make me laugh a lot. But I think the humour in our version comes much more from […] well, there’s one episode where we have two agents chasing a client whom they’re told they have to ‘poach’, and they take this literally and become poachers, so that’s in the same vein—but otherwise I’d say the humour’s more Lubitsch, in other words we the audience know what’s going on behind the closed door but a character doesn’t, which is the definition of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ in a way. From time to time you laugh out loud, but in general the plot’s dramatic.

Harold Valentin—With a great deal of imagination. But even for us with Dix pour cent, there are some episodes that are much more dramatic and others that are more comical, and the further we got through the seasons, the more we had a sense of what a particular actor was capable of. Though farce isn’t generally done on TV, we could then really push some scenes—Andréa giving birth at work, for example—because we knew our actors could handle it without becoming fake. But I’m not sure we would have dared to do that scene in the first season, as it could have seemed ridiculous. As for how audiences saw it, it’s hard to say; I only know that all our actors are consummate professionals who totally inhabited their roles. We’ve stopped at Season 4—apart from a special—and now they’re all in demand everywhere, which is great. But I don’t really know why it travelled, except what I said at the start. Regarding Camille Cottin’s role, we had a sense she could become a cult figure during the writing process, but we did a lot of castings and she got the part immediately. As far as France goes, I think there was a gap in 30-something actresses: we only had very pretty girls, with no flaws. And Camille with her nose, her look, her own beauty, that also sent the message that women shouldn’t worry about having something a bit different from other people, as they look at her and she’s seductive (also an ideal for French women). At the time in series, and French series specifically, there were no actresses like that. There were more in Britain, actually—there was less attachment to a very classical beauty there at the time. But that’s changing in France now, too.

Kira Kitsopanidou—As we’ve gone over our allotted time, we need to draw this fascinating event to a close, with many thanks again to Harold and Christian for many new perspectives on this trailblazing postnational show.