Lost Seul

The cast and creative team behind Seul (Alone at Sea) preview this France Télévisions TV movie about a yachtsman’s incredible voyage of survival during a solo around-the-world race, and reveal the challenges they faced filming at sea.

Every four years, the Vendée Globe poses the ultimate test for sailors – a solo, non-stop, around-the-world yacht race. This year marks the 10th edition of the challenge, with 40 skippers due to set off from Les Sables-d’Olonne in France on a course that takes them south through the Atlantic Ocean, around Antarctica and back again.

To coincide with this year’s event, a TV movie that focuses one of the most dramatic moments in the Vendée Globe’s history will air on France 2. In 2000, Frenchman Yves Parlier was among those at the starting line on his yacht, Aquitaine Innovations, and held the lead for a long time during the early stages.

But on December 19, his mast broke amid heavy seas and he also lost contact with the race organisers. Miraculously, however, Parlier was able to fix his yacht by constructing a new mast and continue the race, finishing 13th out of 15. Nine sailors did not complete the course.

Seul (Alone at Sea) follows Yves, played by Samuel Le Bihan (Alex Hugo, Braquo), as he sets out to conquer the “Everest of the Seas” with a win-at-all-costs attitude. When he leaves his loved ones behind to follow in the footsteps of his childhood heroes, he has no idea that he will become a part of a completely different adventure – one that becomes an incredible test of endurance and survival.

Produced by High Sea Production and sold internationally by France TV Distribution, the series comes from writers Julien Guerif and Pierre Isoard, who is also the director. Isoard had followed the race on the radio and always imagined making a movie of Parlier’s ordeal, but felt it would be impossible without the weight of Hollywood behind him.

Then with support from Guerif and producer Patrick André, he was encouraged to “go for it.”

“We had known each other in our former life working in the advertising industry and we decided we wanted to do a new project together,” André tells DQ, speaking at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. “We were looking for a truly powerful story to tell and thought this story of a sailor who was so passionate that he went on to the end of the race was a really powerful story to tell.”

Seul marked a new adventure for André. “It was the first time I was trying to produce something for television. I’d always been a producer for cinema before,” he says. “The TV budget was not nearly enough for what we would have needed for this kind of movie, so we had to find other solutions. We looked for other partners, and got partners in Belgium and looked for other funders beside France Télévisions. When we finally managed to get the funds together, we shot over 30 days, which is a lot more than it usually takes for a TV movie.”

Blending fact and fiction, Isoard wanted to focus on the “interesting” psychological elements of the story, so he made Yves “a little more arrogant” at the start of the race so that his character shift is more pronounced when “nature just gives him a huge slap in the face.”

“He was a guy who loves his tech. He knows how to use a satellite but doesn’t know anything about nature, or about how to fish,” the director explains. “That’s what I wanted people to understand. I thought the psychological aspect was especially interesting because of Yves’ psychology, because after that race, after he came back, he decided to stop racing. Now he’s kite surfing with a green traction system without fuel. He’s a genius.”

Le Bihan agrees that Seul isn’t a story just about sailing. Instead, it’s about “courage, determination, accepting difficulties and accepting suffering. You know who you are in that kind of situation,” the actor says. “That’s why it’s a universal story. It’s not talking about sailing but about something you can be confronted with.

“To be an actor is to live something like this, to live an adventure, to meet crazy people and to go everywhere in the world. That’s why I chose this role, because it was different every day and you can get so many different experiences. But you cannot do a movie like this every year. Afterwards, I did a comedy.”

Le Bihan describes making Seul as “crazy,” owing to the amount of time he spent filming on Yves’ yacht at sea with a small crew. And for large parts of the process, he really was alone at sea as the cameras captured him on the yacht.

“Usually when you make a movie on the sea, you need a lot of money, you need to fuel boats, a lot of retakes, the weather changes, the wind changes, the light changes, and usually it’s a bit tough – and we didn’t have money,” he says. “It was like making a short movie when you start as a student with your friend – you go with nothing, just your story and your motivation. It was very hard.

“Every day we left to shoot the scenes [at sea] and we never knew if we could get something. We were not sure of anything. Finally, day after day, we got the scenes we expected. We never had an accident. We weren’t in danger, but we had storms. Sometimes we had no wind. We had every kind of weather you had in the real story.”

To play the role, he had to lose 10kg to mimic Parlier’s weight loss at sea. And because of the unpredictable weather conditions, he also had to learn the whole script from the outset so he could be ready to record any scene it was possible to shoot that day.

“It was all dependent on the weather. I knew everything, I was dreaming about it. I knew every detail,” he says.

Isoard says it was a “huge endeavour” for Le Bihan to lose so much weight for the role. “It was extremely difficult for him. He basically stopped eating,” the director says. “At the beginning, you couldn’t really see it because it was cold and he was wearing his bigger coats, but the further south he went [on the yacht], the more layers he was taking off and that’s when people started seeing he had lost so much weight.”

Another challenge was Yves’ beard. “He had three different beards and it was difficult because sometimes we would ask make-up to switch his beards at 2am,” Isoard remembers.

“Each and every one of us had different roles and we chose the scenes we would shoot that day based on the weather. It was easy at the beginning because when the weather was not so good, we shot scenes set in the southern seas, and when the weather was better, we shot scenes set on the equator. But at the end of the shoot, we were so dependant on the weather because we didn’t have so much choice anymore. It got really unnerving.”

Starring alongside Le Bihan are Clément Bresson, Anaël Guez, Fréderic Bocquet and Anne Suarez, who plays Yves’ wife Isabelle. Suarez was able to shoot her scenes on dry land before the crew set sail with Le Bihan, and at times it must have seemed as if she were shooting a completely different story.

She spent “hours and hours” trying to research the real Isabelle Parlier for the role. “But she’s a very private person. She hasn’t given many interviews, she’s very protective of the couple’s private life, but there were a few things from when they were reunited after he came back from the race that I based my character on,” the actor explains. “It was really difficult [for her] because you’re afraid of losing him but, at the same time, you want him to follow his dreams and do what he loves.”

Ahead of the film’s launch later this year, Isoard pitches Seul as a “.” “It’s a story of modern life, where everything is faster and faster, there’s more and more technology and at some point you realise you don’t know how to work with nature. There’s nothing you can do,” he says.

“It’s a story about resilience, about someone who is trying to make it, whatever it takes,” adds André. “Most people in the industry call Yves the extraterrestrial, because nobody would have imagined that it would have been possible for him to repair his mast on his own, and then, with no food left at the end, make it all the way to the finish line. It’s a story about resilience. He is the true hero of the Vendée Globe, even if he didn’t finish first.”

tagged in: Alone at Sea, Anne Suarez, France Télévisions, France TV Distribution, High Sea Production, Julien Guerif, Patrick André, Pierre Isoard, Samuel Le Bihan, Seul