All posts by Paula Tsoni

Democracy in action

DQ heads to Brussels, home of the EU, to watch filming of Parlement (Parliament), a drama about youth, commitment and making a difference in a post-Brexit world.

It’s a typically sunny but freezing winter day in the administrative quarter of Brussels when an unusually restless crowd loaded with waffles and filming equipment lands on the seventh floor of the building that houses the European Economic and Social Committee.

The penultimate day of shooting comedy-drama Parlement (Parliament) for France Télévisions’ digital platform France.tv has just kicked off, this time a few blocks away from the European Parliament’s main building.

“Shooting a series inside the European Parliament is not really common. We had some convincing to do,” says Cinétévé producer Thomas Saignes. “We needed to persuade them that the team behind it was serious, that the talent was right and that the intention was also right. It was a long process but we were lucky that the secretary general agreed to meet with us and open the door.”

Balanced between office comedy and psychodrama, the 10-part series follows Samy – a young, overconfident parliamentary assistant who is clueless and prejudiced – arriving at his new job a few days after the Brexit referendum in 2016. As they get ready to film, cast and crew are startled to discover a crazy coincidence: the actual agenda of the day at the European Parliament features a citizens’ initiative addressing the same under-represented topic the fictional lead character of the series fights against – the cruel practice of finning (removing the fin from a shark and discarding the rest of the animal back into the ocean).

On his first day, Samy accidentally raises his hand and must take up a report about finning, but he hasn’t got a clue about the subject or how he can get the report through the system. “To be clear, in the beginning he doesn’t even give a dime, but he is taken into the machinery of the bureaucracy and over the course of the series, it will become his personal fight as he puts everything at stake – his personal interests, his dignity, his time, his love life – to pass this report,” Saignes explains.

Xavier Lacaille (left) as Samy alongside Lucas Englander as Torsten

Leading actor and French comedian Xavier Lacaille admits his background studying law helped him to better relate to this role, even though the only costume he has to wear is Samy’s work suit. He demonstrates how he walks without touching his heels on the floor to bring out the clumsiness of the character and to appear taller than he is.

Having lived in the US for several years, Lacaille also needed to find his French accent again when speaking English. “It’s not a huge thing, but for the first few days of shooting it was tricky because you need to keep the same accent throughout,” he says.

The idea for Parlement came from two people who both have strong personal connections to the subject matter – producer Fabienne Servan Schreiber, CEO of Cinétévé, whose husband served as an MEP, and writer Noé Debré, who was born and raised across the street from the EU headquarters in Strasbourg. They shared the same passion for the institution and, having had insider experience of it, had long thought the European Parliament was an interesting arena for fiction, although broadcasters appeared hard to persuade.

“They found it almost repulsive, because they thought it was boring as a subject and some of them perhaps had the fear that it would be Euro-bashing because it is political satire,” Saignes recalls.

After discussions about the show with a French pay TV service and American platforms were dropped, his own intuition pointed towards a European coproduction, with France.tv airing the series alongside Belgium’s BeTV and Germany’s WDR. It will debut on France.tv this Thursday.

“I knew we had to make it international to the core, with a European writers room and a European cast,” he continues. “But it was still difficult to convince broadcasters, until one lucky occasion. France Télévisions was launching its streaming platform so they needed an original project that would be spoken about. Then we started a long process of gathering coproducers and convincing different channels.”

Director of photography Lucie Baudinand

All3Media’s 7Stories helped with allocating a UK co-writer, Daran Johnson, while Studio Hamburg’s CineCentrum (Germany) and Artemis (Belgium) joined as coproducers. Further funding was granted by Creative Europe’s Media fund, France’s CNC and Germany’s MFG, with France TV Distribution handling international sales. With the help of agents from five countries, the production cast actors of seven nationalities, with scripts including four languages.

Co-written by Debré, Johnson, Pierre Dorac and Maxime Calligaro, the scripts shift between a didactic, explicatory and funny take on European politics. Precision was vital – all terms and procedures had to be absolutely correct, as they would for an ER medical drama. Consultants double- and triple-checked the accuracy of all legal procedural technicalities involved.

Armando Iannucci’s political satires Veep and The Thick of It served as a source of inspiration but Saignes points out that Parlement’s approach doesn’t ape Iannucci’s razor-sharp style. “We didn’t want to make an advert for the European Union with Parlement, but we didn’t want to do any Euro-bashing either. You need to love what you laugh at – the craziness of the institution, of the bureaucracy – to be able to make fun of it in a positive way.

“Essentially, ours is a series about youth, commitment and making a difference. It is to say, don’t become frustrated by political action, by collective action, by compromise, by discussion, by convincing; there is one arena where you can make a difference, and it’s here in Brussels.”

In his adventures, Samy is joined by Rose (Liz Kingsman), a British assistant and Brexiteer just about to realise the major life decisions she needs to make post-Brexit. “Tragedy is when the heroes are aware of the drama, and comedy is when they are not – and Samy and Rose don’t have the slightest idea of the internal bureaucracy that they will be caught in,” says Jérémie Sein, who directs with Émilie Noblet. “For us, reading a script is very technical and it’s very rare to be reading and laughing at the same time. Putting a rookie in the middle of a new environment is a cliché, but our writers did it without losing the funniness or the characters.”

L-R: Actors Lacaille and Liz Kingsman with co-director Émilie Noblet

“When we read Parlement, the first reference that comes to mind is The Office, but we chose a handling that is a bit more sophisticated. We are not at all in a pseudo-documentary – this is actual fiction. We tried to edit it and visually imagine it sophisticatedly,” Noblet explains. “We gave ourselves freedom to film the scenes, so we have a variety of styles. The only thing that we kept is the frequent use of short focus, which works really well with comedy.”

For Sein, German and Belgian filming styles are more akin to those in Hollywood so some French naturalism was added. “We didn’t try to make everyone happy. We went towards what we knew best, which is naturalist comedy à la Français, with cold humour, and we inserted more colour and design,” he says, stressing that the union of actors from different nationalities with different approaches to acting made it crucial to cast the right talent for the two leading roles.

“Although Liz is English and Xavier is French, they had the same energy and everybody could find their style and gravitate around those two very grounded comedians. We found two good planets for the other stars to revolve around in an interesting manner – in a way, that resembles the EU flag a bit,” he laughs.

“Rose’s British sense of humour, which is very confronting to Samy, was the best cocktail ever. In terms of acting, they were both getting every shot perfect from the first take and were a pleasure to work with,” agrees Noblet.

In a corridor on the set, German star Christiane Paul says her experience of working with actors from diverse backgrounds and young directors on a low-budget series was as intriguing as the script and she found herself laughing out loud while reading it on a train, triggering curious glances from other commuters.

L-R: Parlement co-director Jérémie Sein with actors Philippe Duquesne and William Nadylam

“I loved the wit of it and the telling of a story about the European Parliament. I believe it was time for this to happen,” says the Emmy-winning actor, who plays Ingeborg, a manipulative German political advisor described as a nightmare.

Paul’s challenge was speaking in sophisticated French – a language she barely knows. “I built my character on the French language in a way – I learned my lines phonetically and I just try to remember them. Of course, I understand what I am saying and I am really aware of what the scenes are about,” she says, describing how a French piano teacher living nearby helped her with her lines.

Her scene is up next with Lacaille and Austrian-born Lucas Englander. The latter plays Torsten, Ingeborg’s closest partner and a dark passive-aggressive character very much outside of Englander’s real-life temperament.

“It is interesting to shift into Torsten every day because my personality is much quieter than his. To fall into the shoes of someone who is so loud is a stretch. He is very sarcastic the entire time, even with people he doesn’t know well, and therefore he is misunderstood,” he says of his character.

As the crew wraps for the day, Saignes is optimistic the show will travel well, which could be the passport to more seasons – each deployed in, or dealing with, different EU zones and territories. Certain there is plenty of material for several seasons, he suggests season two could still have a Brexit component, and possibly even a quirky romantic aspect through a fling between Samy and Rose while she has to leave Brussels for the UK.

“People often say that comedy doesn’t travel well, because what is funny for the Danes, for example, is not funny for the Spaniards,” he says. “But here we felt that we had one arena that was the home of all those people and struck a chord – where you can make fun of all those people together and find a way for comedy to work well for everyone.”

tagged in: , , , ,

Directing the flow

After a decade away from the small screen, veteran Greek director Manousos Manousakis talks to DQ about returning to TV with To Kokkino Potami (Red River) and why historical dramas should talk as much to the present as the past.

A master of hit romance series throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Greek director/scriptwriter Manousos Manousakis has made a triumphant comeback to television with his stirring historical series To Kokkino Potami (Red River), branded by mesmerised viewers as “the love story of the season.”

Based on the eponymous novel by Charis Tsirkinidis, it follows the real-life story of a prominent young couple from Pontus, a then Greek-populated region on the southern coast of the Black Sea, at the turn of the 19th century. Years after their arranged engagement as children, Miltos Pavlidis (Ioannis Papazisis) and Ifigeneia Nikolaidi (Anastasia Pantousi), now young adults, meet by chance in Constantinople and fall madly in love before discovering each other’s identity. Their romance flourishes amidst the unrest started by the rebellion of the Young Turks political reform movement against the rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II and fights to survive through a line-up of events that lead to extreme violence against minorities.

Manousos Manousakis with cast members on the Red River set

Filmed in 16 locations across Greece, Russia and France with a cast of 170 actors and more than 1,100 extras, mixing languages and idioms, the 30-part series is set during the turbulent era surrounding the events of the Pontic Greek genocide, which remains today unrecognised by international politics.

The hotly anticipated production opened with an astonishing 30% viewing share in dynamic audiences on its Sunday primetime premiere in October and kept climbing the charts in following weeks, thus offering new channel Open Beyond the fiction breakthrough it longed for since its rebrand from Epsilon under new ownership in 2018.

Having dedicated the past decade to movie-making as Greece’s recession haunted its TV industry, Manousakis feels thrilled to be working on the small screen again. “Television is my home. It makes me happy and brings me close to the people. It’s the greatest joy for a creator like me to be stopped by viewers on the street and be told how they like what you do or how much they missed you,” he smiles.

Although he had picked his theme for the series and started detailed historical research about four years ago, making the series a reality was a matter of finding the right host for such an ambitious project. Russian-Greek businessman and former politician Ivan Savvidis, a newcomer to the domestic TV industry and of Pontic Greek origin himself, became that host soon after acquiring Open Beyond. Manousakis recalls that “by good coincidence, Savvidis was already familiar with the novel and personally embraced the project from the first moment.” Open Beyond also produces.

With a sigh, the director said how much he wished that Red River was not as tragically relevant to the present day as it is – a nod to the incessant warfare in Syria. Nonetheless, one of the reasons that made him want to make this series so much was to show the similarities of the period with today, a whole century later. “The politics of the great powers are repeating themselves in a nightmarishly identical way,” he says. “Yesterday’s allies were tomorrow’s enemies, and vice versa, but the people couldn’t see it. Like nowadays, our heroes believed that their daily lives were in the safe zone, that they could never be threatened and that the law and order would always protect them. But the world just disappeared from under their feet, literally within hours.”

Over 170 actors, 1,100 extras and 600 costumes are needed for Red River

The love story of Miltos and Ifigeneia masterfully unfolds, intertwined with real facts, movements and political motivations of the time. The biggest task, says Manousakis, was to acquire the necessary historical knowledge, though not in a logistical way.

“The challenge is to get emotionally involved in the story and make it part of your everyday,” he explains. “To see the people of that era as your relatives and friends, in flesh and bone, nerves and real existence, not as characters on paper. When you have such a subject, that era becomes your everyday and your reality, while you suffer, rejoice and celebrate alongside your heroes, and come back against the same situations as them.”

The actors have had to study the era thoroughly too – not just events but attitudes and morals. “The feelings are the same, then and now, but the way we express them and speak of them is worlds apart,” Manousakis says. “How people interacted; how a young man in love held the hand of his girlfriend then or how he would dare a first kiss, as opposed to now; how the mother spoke to her child; the neighbours to each other; the priest to his church; it’s a different era, with different behavioural and relationship rules.”

Throughout his career, Manousakis has always overviewed his projects’ scripts. His hard copy of To Kokkino Potami, about 200 pages originally, is filled with some 300 inserts of his own notes. The writing process starts with scriptwriters Nikos Apeiranthitis and Dora Masklavanou, who send him the first draft, which he makes remarks on, before forwarding it to his longtime partners Stavros Avdoulos and Irene Ritsoni for changes. He reads through the updated version and completes it up to a certain point, then the script is back to the first two, who finalise it and give it to Manousakis for one last comb-through.

The daily filming schedule is a challenge and an achievement in itself, he adds, due to the numerous talent and locations involved. Each episode requires eight to 10 days of shooting. “We do have good technology and a very good financial environment, but beyond that, we need to be creative, clever and daring Ulysses in order to bring that surplus value to the screen. We need to go around and find the best solutions for the most difficult situations,” he comments.

“The challenge is to get emotionally involved in the story and make it part of your everyday”

Regardless of his 10-year break from making series, ratings confirm that Manousakis is as commercial as he ever was. He categorically denies having a “recipe” or “key” to success, though, joking that a producer can’t order the director to make a calculated success comprising five grammes of love, six grammes of violence and eight grammes of sex. “If you start with, ‘let’s do this because it’s catchy,’ you fail,” he says.

On the contrary, he believes a prerequisite for success is the love that anyone involved in the project should feel towards it, from the producers to the extras. Furthermore, for a romance to become an iconic hit, the words between the lovers, for example, should reflect true love, which the viewer can immediately recognise, since “everybody has both faked interest, and truly loved in their lifetime.”

He affirms that, in every series he has done, he was burning with a desire to share each story with audiences: “You can make nothing if you are not in love with what you do. The dominant feeling is the Eros towards your subject; being unable to not concern yourself with it, and nothing but it. Then, it’s paramount joy when the will of the creator matches the will of the viewers. And that means that what the creator wants in that given moment is what the society craves for.”

Even though the habits of viewers have changed in the last 10 years, what remains invariable is their need to become involved in what they watch. “If this is achieved, they drift away” into the story, he notes.

Despite the fact that Manousakis has been successful in different genres, from police procedural Tmima Ithon (1992) to comedy Gia Mia Gynaika Kai Ena Autokinito (2001), he is best known for dramatic and socially influential love stories. The clashing socioeconomic backgrounds of his starring couples and their struggle to live happily ever after against stereotypes and prejudices were always a focal point in his work – a wealthy architect with a Roma gypsy (Psithyroi Kardias, 1997), a cleric with a congregant (Aggigma Psychis, 1998), a Muslim with a Christian (Min Mou Les Antio, 2004), to name a few. Only now, in Red River, his first historical series, there is “a differentiation in the size of things,” he says, as the contrast escalates on a much broader level and gains ecumenical dimensions, seen in the context of horrendous atrocities.

Director Manousakis at work

“In this case, the clash is not between the couple and their entourage, but between them as a couple, and the historical situation,” he exclaims. “In a collapsing society, where laws, moral values and all they had for granted is falling apart, everything vanished except from their love.”

Here too, however, like in many of his previous dramas, Manousakis is concerned with bigotry, racism and fanaticism, all of which he condemns by showing the extent they can wreck a healthy society. He explores “the processes that the man next door, the friend and neighbour who smiled to me yesterday go through until the moment they become my persecutor, my killer or my rapist.”

Acknowledging the attraction of period dramas worldwide, the director explains that people everywhere are, and will always be, interested in history as long as it’s not handled as a museum exhibit. “History is a flowing reality in which we should participate. It should be relevant to today, and its past-time heroes should be recognisable by present-day viewers. A 20-year-old girl should be able to identify with that 1908 girl of the same age,” he says.

While his most iconic, socially sensitive romances have always triggered popular debate, this time Manousakis aspires to motivate his audience not only to become more aware of timeless international political games, but also to disconnect the notion of patriotism from fascism in the collective mind of modern-day Greeks.

“We have wrongly matched up patriotism with political ideologies and are intimidated to express love to our country out of fear of being negatively labelled,” he surmises. “Both the right wing, the left wing, the communist and the anarchist, can each love their country, and all have the right to do so without being characterised for their beliefs.”

tagged in: , , , , , , ,

Dark web

Web series Athens Dark is Greece’s first vampire drama. DQ talks to writer Zisis Roubos and director Vasilis Antoniadis about getting their teeth into its supernatural world in eight 10-minute episodes.

Antenna Group-owned web channel Netwix in Greece has returned to original drama production with Athens Dark, the country’s first ever vampire drama. Filmed with an emphasis on action and using the latest technology, the 8×10′ series was launched as a web exclusive, with all episodes uploaded simultaneously and available to watch for free.

The show, created by scriptwriter Zisis Roubos and directed and produced by Vasilis Antoniadis, brings to life a dark supernatural world, with references spanning from classic vampire literature to ancient Greek mythology.

The story follows Orfeas (Spyros Chatziaggelakis), a young journalist who thinks his life and career are at a dead end. However, things change when he gets commissioned to cover a goth music concert, where he witnesses a lethal battle between vampires and vampire hunters. He also meets Maximos (Antonis Taniskidis), an aggressive, ancient vampire who offers him eternal life and revenge on his best friend’s killers and his girlfriend’s kidnappers.

“A very magical thing we have in Greece is a huge folklore and history. It is no coincidence that the original vampire legend – not in its newer construction of a romantic lord, which was created mainly after 1800 – began in Ancient Greece, with various creatures and stories,” says Roubos. “So I changed these stories, these beliefs and myths to fit the audience. I did not keep any references or sources as they were. For example, in my own world of vampires, I present Hecate, the famous Ancient Greek chthonic goddess, as the mother of all the undead. But I took elements from other cultures too. I merged the old with the new, and the gothic aesthetic with the modern everyday Greek aesthetic, since what interested me was to create a script that makes the audience believe it takes place in today’s Athens.”

Vasilis Antoniadis (left) and Zisis Roubos

He continues: “I believe it is very important that the story you tell has characters with whom the viewer can identify. So, by placing this world in the Athens of today, I was very interested in telling the story of the characters, in focusing on the history of each of them and in ‘Hellenising’ the vampire genre as much as possible.”

Roubos admits he wrote some of the characters with the actors who eventually played them in mind. However, director/producer Antoniadis had a more strategic approach to casting Athens Dark.

“We took into consideration the young audience which we expected the series to have and we decided to introduce new talented actors who both myself and the scriptwriter appreciate professionally,” he says. “Because we are dealing with a new genre for the Greek audience, we wanted the cast to be able to convey the story as authentically as possible, so the fact that these actors are mostly fans of the genre themselves was also a catalyst in the selection.”

For Roubos, penning a series of short episodes specifically designed for the web was a huge challenge. “It’s a broken narrative, a preface to this dark world in eight 10-minute episodes in which I had to go through characters, history, narrative and action,” he explains. “This was very difficult, but it was also a very important experience for me, especially in the way I deal with the written word.”

Antoniadis adds: “This project had several peculiarities for many reasons. From the beginning, we looked at it as a feature film, to deliver a cinematic result at a very low cost and in a shooting period of only 16 days, under very difficult conditions and without many resources.”

Athens Dark stars Spyros Chatziaggelakis as Orfeas, who is drawn into the underworld

The biggest challenge on a vampire drama is to make the viewer feel the supernatural characters they see in the series might actually be among them in reality, “let alone in Athens,” Antoniadis continues. The show’s creative team attempted to achieve this by blending visual effects with impressively choreographed battles and by filming at central locations in the city that would be recognisable to any Athenian.

“All the filming took place in Athens,” says the director. “We chose only natural spaces and we sought to escape the images we have seen before. Characteristic images in the series are the scenes we shot in an abandoned building in the Dromokaiteio Psychiatric Hospital and in an underground gallery in Kesariani, where the tomb of Hecate exists in our story.”

Antoniadis says the use of VFX was crucial: “We had to redo the same shots with and without special effects. It changed the way we created the frame so that in post-production we would have the opportunity to create a plausible result. This whole process was particularly difficult because, unlike in international films and series, in our country the infrastructure for special effects doesn’t exist. Nonetheless, the Athens Dark team in charge of make-up and special effects did a terrific job under the circumstances, and I hope that in a second season the possibilities and resources will be bigger to be able to make even more special things.”

Antoniadis acknowledges that, overall, opportunities to produce web series in Greece are still very limited. However, he adds that such shows’ online presence makes them more visible to young audiences, freeing producers from the stress of hitting viewing targets and setting them free creatively.

“This is a big de-stressing factor,” Roubos notes. “The game played with TV numbers is a bit unfair for some TV products, because it is determined not by the qualitative factors or production factors of the series itself, but clearly by what kind of audience will watch your product at its specific time of broadcast. So there are too many factors that play a role in whether a TV series will succeed.

The show airs on Antenna-owned web channel Netwix

“On the internet, on the other hand, there are no viewing charts. There is a product uploaded and it’s there for anyone who wants to click and watch it, whenever they want. And I am very happy that a large-scale fiction production for web streaming has happened  in Greece for the first time, because I hope this will be a start of endless similar projects in our country.”

Antoniadis, whose prodco Filmskin produces Athens Dark, adds: “I believe web viewing platforms are the future in Greece and internationally, and I am glad that I have the opportunity to contribute to their development. In the years to come, a large percentage of the market will be oriented in this direction.”

As for vampire dramas, he says: “In Greece, we are not used to seeing local productions of such series. [It’s a challenge to make this show a success] so that large organisations can invest in similar productions to begin to develop this genre even further here.”

While it might be too early for Netwix to comment on the potential commissioning of further episodes of Athens Dark, Roubos sees the first eight as an introduction to this vampire underworld and also envisions a book release. He would also like to see Athens Dark subtitled to reach foreign audiences, as he aims to create products that have the potential to be sold internationally.

“I am a huge fan of cliffhangers,” he jokes, as the ambitious Greek vampire saga begins its journey online.

tagged in: , , , ,