Zonz of interest
French dramedy Zonz (Jailbreakers) follows a group of teenagers who find friendship, and possibly freedom, together in a youth detention centre. Co-creators Marine Maugrain-Legagneur and Quentin Pissot tell DQ how the dynamic series was brought to the screen.
Zonz was never meant to be a traditional television series. The young-adult dramedy about a group of teenagers locked up together in a detention centre was commissioned by France Télévisions’ youth-skewing Slash brand for its online platform.
But following its success after launching in May this year, France TV scheduled a dedicated ‘Zonz Night’ on its flagship channel France 2 to allow viewers to binge the characterful, pacey and visually dynamic series, which is packed with fast editing and cutaways that help to create its absorbing mix of drama and humour.
“When we created the show, we thought, ‘OK, we are making a show for a platform. We are going to do everything we can’t do on television,’” series co-creator and writer Quentin Pissot tells DQ. “That’s why the rhythm is like that. The timelines in the episodes really shift. We have flash-forwards, flashbacks and stuff like that. We did everything we couldn’t do on TV and, in the end, they broadcast us on TV.”
Inspired by British directors such as Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie, that energetic visual style was in the script from the beginning, with Pissot collaborating with fellow co-creators and writers Marine Maugrain-Legagneur – who is also his wife – and Alicia Pratx. Maugrain-Legagneur also directed the series with Marine Colomies.
“We thought about the main structure of the episodes, the dramatic cuts, the [on-screen] texts and other things in the script, and then Marine could carry on this vision [on set],” Pissot says. “It was really great, because she has been there from the beginning, from the early stage of the project, so there is the creative vision [all the way through]. It’s not really a usual thing in French television to have a creator of a show work right up until the end of editing. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to do that.”
Maugrain-Legagneur, who has been a screenwriter for the past 10 years, admits she always finds it difficult for her to hand over a script to another director to take forward. “So I wanted to direct [Zonz],” she says. “I really think that’s the way to make better shows – to make the scriptwriters work the whole way until editing, even if they don’t direct the show.
“In the writing, you have to make a lot of tiny decisions that, from the outside, may seem completely useless or futile, but they make a lot of sense. Being able to be there from the beginning and say, ‘OK, this character cannot do that,’ or, ‘He has to say this precise thing,’ it helps tremendously.”
Featuring an ensemble cast of largely unknown young actors, Zonz opens with Alice, a 17-year-old student who finds herself behind bars in a brutal juvenile detention centre. Desperate to return home to care for her ill mother, the straight-A student quickly decides to keep her head down and become a model inmate in the hope of an early release.
When she discovers a secret plot to stage a daring breakout, Alice decides to infiltrate the group and learn more about their plan, with a view to turning them over to the guards in exchange for her freedom. But as the plan takes shape, Alice becomes friendly with the group and finds she must make a choice: betray her new friends or escape with them.
Distributed by Oble under the international title Jailbreakers, Zonz is produced by La Meridienne. Mona Claude plays Alice, with Adem Benosmane as Hacine, Roman Doduik as Gabin, Bilel Chegrani as Killian, Hind Faiz as Reem, Nelligan as Rose, Mohamed Cissé as Sanjay and Raoul Denez as Dimitri. Camille Chamoux, star of the French adaptation of British comedy Ghosts, plays prison director Myriam.
The origins of Zonz can be found in Maugrain-Legagneur’s previous series Mental, another Slash series, set in a children’s psychiatric clinic where the young patients form bonds and friendships through shared therapy sessions. When she met producer Pierre Hervé, he suggested creating a dramedy similar in tone but this time set in a youth detention centre.
“I worked in prisons for a while when I was a student, so it’s an environment that moves me and interests me. And I really wanted to work with Quentin,” Maugrain-Legagneur says.
“Edgar Wright was my childhood hero and Prison Break was the first ever show I binge-watched,” Pissot reveals. “So she came to me and said, ‘Would you like to do a Prison Break with teenagers?’ I was like, ‘Yeah!’”
Work on the series started with the numerous characters that populate the prison, but the writers were also sure to build out their lives before the series finds them locked up together, keen to depict the realities of teenagers in France today despite the show’s comedic nature.
“It’s a very important age, because they are young adults and it’s a period of life when you make choices that define you as a person,” Pissot says. “You choose who you want to be friends with, what you want for your life, and the prison is like a catalyst for that. We had to think about the people before thinking about the prisoners.”
That’s where Maugrain-Legagneur’s work on Mental came in useful, as she already had experience of immediately introducing the audience to a large number of characters. “The first episode was actually really hard to do,” Pissot continues, “because you have to introduce the audience to prison, to the tone of the show, to the characters. How do you meet them? How do they meet each other? There were a lot of headaches, but Marine was a strong element to overcome these difficulties.”
Notably, it’s not until the show’s sixth episode that many of the characters’ origin stories are revealed, as the creators wanted viewers to get to know them first before finding out how they got there. It’s also an example of the broader structure of the series, where each episode can be described as ‘The one with the action’ or ‘The one with the riot.’
“Really early on the development, it was Marine who had this strong idea to say, ‘I want to make a show where we can say ‘the episode where…’ We have the riot episode. We have the episode where the family comes to see them in prison and it’s almost in real time. We have a musical episode. We have a football episode.”
As the series also covers the main escape plot and includes personal dramas for each character, each episode had three or four different elements to squeeze into a half-hour running time.
With Maugrain-Legagneur also directing, changes to the script could be completed quickly once filming began. And because so many shots were needed for the show’s quick-cut style, Pissot even took up a continuity role to ensure nothing was out of place.
“I’ve always been on her side, because I’m her main supporter. I’m her cheerleader,” he says. “I had the opportunity to be on set for all the shooting. It’s not a usual thing to do, but I talked a lot with the actors and I helped basically everyone. I carried stuff. I was everybody’s cheerleader.
“Plus, it’s always full of surprises, and sometimes you have to make quick adjustments. It was good to have both the creators there. We spent a whole lunch together rewriting a scene that couldn’t be done at all, and we had to say, ‘OK, we have 30 minutes to rethink everything before it’s shot.’ It was very exciting.”
Production took place across 45 days at a recently closed prison in Bar sur Aube, near Troyes in France’s eastern Champagne region. On set, cast and crew had to contend with a lack of heating, made worse by poor weather, though the actors were quick to adapt to their surroundings.
The size of the building meant lighting proved to be one of the numerous technical challenges, but the set decorators were “thrilled” to have a real prison to transform into the show’s main setting. Due to the cramped nature of the real cells, fake prison rooms were built with removable walls to ensure actors, camera operators and sound engineers could all fit comfortably.
Some crew members even secured personal mementos from their time on the project. “The lead decorator asked one of his crewmates to bring his tattoo stuff and he got a tattoo at the end,” Pissot recalls, “because he wanted to be able to say, ‘I was tattooed in prison.’ He actually did get a tattoo in a prison cell on set.”
While Zonz was designed as a one-off series, Maugrain-Legagneur and Pissot are understandably open to returning to the world of the show should France Télévisions renew it. Either way, they believe they have achieved their ambition to tell a story that shows that friendship can come in many forms and appear in unexpected ways.
“We created characters that are clearly not from the same universe,” Pissot says. “Alice is [Harry Potter character] Hermione Granger, and next to that, we have Gabin, who is inspired by a character from Scum, an English movie we recommend. They’re not at all the same character, and bringing them together, you say, ‘OK, you can have a straight-A student and a kid who grew up in the suburbs and has been beaten by cops all his life, and they have some common ground and there is hope.’”
“That’s also why we didn’t want the audience to know what they did [to end up in prison] at the beginning of the show,” Maugrain-Legagneur says. “You don’t know that until the end for Alice, and you don’t know that for six episodes for most of them. We wanted to have characters you could relate to first, and after that you know why they’re there.”
“Maybe once you know them as human beings, you have a better understanding of what went wrong in their lives,” Pissot adds. “We had this experience where we said, ‘Yes, our show will be happening in prison and the main characters will be prisoners.’ Everyone was like, ‘Oh, so they are delinquents. They are bad people.’ But it was important for us to say, ‘Everybody makes mistakes.’ If you spend time getting to know the characters, you will empathise with them.”
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tagged in: Jailbreakers, La Meridienne, Marine Maugrain-Legagneur, Oble, Quentin Pissot, Zonz