Stop your lies: What city was this movie filmed in?

direction brandy!

The novel takes place in three periods and three places: Barbéziers (40 km from Cognac), Bordeaux and Paris. Because Olivier Payon wanted to focus on the present, he decided to reduce the film’s plot to one week in the city of Cognac and its surroundings. He also chose to place the action in the heart of Cognac: “It remains to find the frame that resonates with the subject…”

“An apparently innocuous sentence in the book specifies that Thomas’s parents are cognac growers. I recently made a short documentary for Hennessy’s 250th anniversary. I spent time with the people we saw in the film: the brand’s employees, the Americans. …I thought the setting reflected the book’s description. provincial life”.

“So I invented Baussony cognac, a more modest and family brand than Hennessy, which is the world market leader, but I was lucky that Hennessy accepted to shoot us on their site, in their cellars and even in the chateau. De Bagnolet – the historic house of the Hennessy family, which They never opened for the cameras.The director recalls.

The birth of the project

When he was offered the adaptation, Olivier Payon had not read Philippe Besson’s novel. At the time, the filmmaker thought it was a simple teenage love story and couldn’t see how to reinvent the genre. He says : “When I read the novel, I found this love story both glorious and tragic, but above all, I was completely captivated by the second part of the book, which tells of Philippe Besson’s meeting with Luca, the son of his first love.”

“Lucas’ sentence concluded convincingly: “You should have seen the look in his eyes. It was at that moment that I became convinced that he existed: my father loved him as a boy”. I wanted to tell the story of this son who tries to break his father’s secret and make this meeting the main focus of my film. The novel is quite focused on the past, I wanted to focus on the present.”

Who is Stephen and Thomas at the age of 17?

To find the two young actors to play the 17-year-olds Stéphane and Thomas, Olivier Payon conducted a very long casting call: “Jeremy Gillett and Julien de Saint-Jean It was very good in individual exams, but they were not the only ones. Especially when we made them win everything together. Their duet was so pointless.”

Victor Belmondo Lucas

For Lucas, Olivier Payon was looking for a sunny young actor, modern and good for his time, who can also be attractive and confront his demons: “I wanted to be captured by an actor like Stéphane Belcour was captured by Lucas. No one was touching me… until my casting director sent me a photo of Victor without a name or credit.”

“When I saw him, I thought: ‘Of course!’ I met him some time ago at a festival. He was brilliant, deep, intelligent. He was a ‘grandson’… It’s very strange: until I knew. I never thought 3 Jean-Paul on Belmondo, but when I found out, I didn’t see much more than that.”

“Of course, Victor follows his grandfather, but at the same time he has his own world, something very believable that belongs only to him. He was brilliant in the tests and did not deny this throughout the filming.”

Performing love scenes

The novel is raw at times, and Olivier Payon didn’t want to water it down. If the first scene lacks tenderness between the two characters, then the director wanted to go for more delicacy and joy, as he explains: “Let us feel the desire of another’s body, the intoxication of pleasure.”

“When these two guys are together, there’s nothing else. I’ve never done sex scenes before, but I felt like I knew how to do them once the actors were cast. I felt I had to rely on their energy to create my set.”

“But the most important thing was to always involve Julien and Jeremy in the process, to explain to them what I wanted to do and why, I welcomed their often big suggestions. The freedom we feel, I hope, was born in these scenes. This mutual trust.”