French polish
Writers Claire Lemaréchal, Franck Philippon and director Cathy Verney tell DQ about making new French drama Clean, their partnership behind the scenes and their approach to adapting the British series on which it is based.
In 2019, Sherdian Smith took the lead role in UK drama Cleaning Up. In the six-part ITV series, she played Sam, a single mother-of-two who is part of the invisible cleaning team maintaining the smart offices of a city financial firm. Struggling with an online gambling addiction and drowning in debt, she begins to use valuable insider information to bet big on the stock market.
Sambre and Les revenants (The Returned) star Alix Poisson now heads the cast of Clean, a French adaptation of Cleaning Up that recently had its world premiere at television festival Series Mania ahead of its local launch on broadcaster M6 tonight.
In the four-parter, Poisson plays Lola, a cleaning lady similarly struggling with huge amounts of debt and facing a battle with her ex-husband to retain custody of her two children. When she discovers Antoine, a broker at the bank where she works, is engaged in insider dealing, she has an idea to ease her money problems – and enlists colleagues Jess and Mina to help carry out the scam.
Léonie Simaga (Brocéliande) and Thaïs Vauquières (Sambre) play Jess and Mina, respectively, while Charles Templon is Antoine. The cast also includes Omar Mebrouk, Betina Flender and Raphaëlle Nourry-Mompez.
It was the producer, Tetra Media Fiction (Paris Police 1905), that first approached screenwriting partners Claire Lemaréchal and Franck Philippon with the idea of bringing an adaptation of the original series to France. The company is part of ITV Studios, which holds distribution rights to the original Sister (Chernobyl, Kaos)-produced series and is also shopping this new version.
“We had written a show together with the same producers for M6 a few months earlier and they said why not try a new project in a totally different field,” Lemaréchal tells DQ. “So we watched the English show and started to think about what a French version could be.”
The pair had previously partnered on four-part M6 miniseries Les espions de la terreur, which is set in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, as well as Revival, a TF1 series about a woman driven to discover the identity of her heart donor. But while Lemaréchal has experience adapting several books and another show – Danish series Rita – for French television, Clean marked Philippon’s first attempt.
“I wasn’t even excited or nervous. It was just interesting because the original show has a very strong premise and something very promising,” he says. “At the same time, we thought the direction we should take should be completely different from the original show, probably more of a suspense thriller, less social realism, a little bit more comedy, a feel-good thing.”
Taking that approach from the outset meant Cleaning Up “was very easy to adapt,” because the writers didn’t need to worry about whether they were being too faithful, or not faithful enough, to the original source material.
“You just keep what is interesting and, at the same time, you have the freedom to go your own way,” Philippon continues. “It is interesting as a creator to have this freedom and it’s also interesting to already have this big box with many pieces you can use. I found the experience very fun and interesting.”
For those familiar with writer Mark Marlow’s original series, what is immediately clear when watching Clean is that one element of Cleaning Up has been dispensed with entirely – Sam’s all-consuming gambling habit, which is demonstrated through her constant use of gambling apps on her phone. That thread of the series also leads Sam into a dangerous conflict with a loan shark from whom she previously borrowed money to fund her habit.
The writers behind the French adaptation were convinced they didn’t need to include gambling in their take on the story, and that Lola was just as compelling a character without it.
“We knew it was going to be shorter [four rather than six episodes] but it was not a sacrifice,” Lemaréchal says. “We thought it was more interesting to focus on the mother and her children and the bank and everything she does to ‘gamble’ in a different way. We thought the addiction was unnecessary and we took her somewhere else.”
They also determined that because Sam so often borrows money, then wins more but immediately loses it again, viewers might lose empathy for Lola if she behaved in a similar way. “At least for me as a viewer, at some point I had this feeling like, ‘Well, you deserve what you got because you can’t resist gambling.’ This is the worst feeling that you could have for the protagonist of a show,” he notes, “being far away from her because of her own responsibility in the situation.
“At the same time, because we chose to ramp up the rhythm and the suspense of the show and also reduce the number of episodes, it meant we had to get rid of a lot of pieces. We all agreed on that.”
Director Cathy Verney (Hard, Vernon Subutex) also supported the decision. She watched episode one of Cleaning Up – “I loved the episode and I love the actress” – but then chose to not watch any more in order to focus on her own take on the story. “I didn’t want to be influenced or to copy,” she says.
Philippon praises the pilot of Cleaning Up as “very efficient and very good,” with a “very clear” setup that lays out the promise of the series and the high stakes involved. “That’s probably the episode that we changed the least,” he says.
“The fact that she [Lola] doesn’t have this addiction and she’s not also hunted by this guy she owes money to forced us to get rid of other situations, subplots and family plots. We changed most of the family plots because they were what created this very slow-paced rhythm of the show. We wanted to get rid of this to have a very fast pace, so that the suspense of the show works and it is this page-turner kind of show.”
With the basis of the series firmly in their minds, the writers soon put Cleaning Up behind them to focus on their own version, using only the original scripts for further guidance. They were then able to follow their previously successful writing process, rewriting each other’s scripts until even they don’t know who wrote which line.
“Obviously it’s easier because there was this basis and the general action was there. The characters were created even if we changed many things,” Lemaréchal says. “It’s not like creating everything from scratch, of course, but for the process, we talk a lot and then one of us makes our first draft of the script and then we exchange it and then split.
“We talked a lot about the characters at the beginning and we probably also talked about the structure of the original show and the pieces that were interesting to keep, especially about the main plot of the scam.”
Conversations continued once Verney joined the project, discussing why Lola would make certain choices and what her life might have looked like before viewers meet her in episode one.
For Verney, Clean is notable as one of the few directing projects on which she isn’t also a writer. Disney+’s 2023 series Tout va bien (Everything is Fine) is another rare example. Regardless, “I always write somewhere,” she says. “When you direct, it’s kind of like writing, but I didn’t write at all in the first stage. It was only Franck and Claire. But when I came with the actors, we changed some dialogues and we spoke a lot together before the shooting about the characters and about the end of the series. It’s different [from Cleaning Up], so I proposed a set and a scene, another thing, and it was great because we could speak [freely]. It was nice to do this together.”
In particular, Verney and the writers discussed the ending at length. “Cathy brought some very bright and interesting ideas about how to create a scene for the ending of the plot, and at the same time it’s something very cinematic and very rooted to the world of cleaning and the DNA of the show,” Philippon says. “She had a really great idea and the final scene is really interesting for that reason.”
Together on set, Verney and Poisson would shoot the script as it is written before trying something new or different for individual scenes. Filming took place across Paris, in La Défense for the bank and in the suburbs of Bagnolet and Vincennes for various houses.
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“We would do one take with the lines, and after we’d say, ‘OK, we can try another thing.’ It was like a laboratory,” Verney says. “We needed to find an alchemy and some humour. Sometimes you can find it only with great liberty. You can’t prepare everything.”
Philippon praises the director for “giving life” to the series, the characters and the situations in which they find themselves. “There’s something really exciting just watching that,” he says. “Because the aim is to make it very real, respect to the script doesn’t matter. What matters is the fact that it’s better, it’s more efficient, more real. And the three [main actors] all brought something to their characters. Thaïs brought humour and jokes – most of them weren’t in the script – and this is exactly what you, as a writer, expect from the shoot and from a director and an actor. They make things better and more real and more interesting. So you are always very happy to be disrespected by the fact it’s not exactly the line.”
Verney says making Clean was a “very nice experience,” and believes Cleaning Up has been suitably transplanted to a new environment, with a story that has something to say about “our country, our movements.”
“We can speak about gilets jaunes protests and social movements that mean something here,” she says, hinting at what lies in store as the show progresses. “So we try to give it an identity which is singular.”
As for the trend for local adaptations in a world where viewers are more than happy to watch with subtitles, if they weren’t already used to watching dubbed programming, Lemaréchal admits she often doesn’t see the point of remakes. “Or I wouldn’t want to adapt something. The producer of the remake of This is Us [Je te Promets] asked me if I was interested and I said, ‘No way,’” she reveals.
“I didn’t want to get involved in that. Fleabag, I wasn’t offered to do it, but I would have said no in the same way. But Cleaning Up was different. There was something [new] to bring. I adapted Rita, the Danish show, which is Sam in France, and it was totally different, but it was very interesting as well because there is really something different and original to do in France over longer episodes. It was much easier to adapt Cleaning Up than Rita.”
“The reason we decided we were interested in this show was because there was a very interesting setup and very interesting characters, with very strong premise but, at the same time, we wanted to do it in a very different way,” Philippon says of making Clean. “You have the most interesting pieces [of the original] and you have the freedom to do something different.”
Whether viewers have seen the original or not, the creators of Clean now hope it will offer something new and fresh to French audiences. “It’s kind of a thriller, but also comedy, but it’s also quite realistic, with people, heroes, that are very different from what you are used to seeing in French television – and broadcast television, especially,” Philippon adds. “So this is an original proposition. We all, as viewers, look for something a bit different, something original. Maybe people will be interested in watching it.”
tagged in: Cathy Verney, Claire Lemaréchal, Clean, Cleaning Up, Franck Philippon, ITV, ITV Studios, M6, Tetra Media Fiction