Peace Process: Camille Chameau and Damien Bonnard create a Universal Charter of Couples’ Rights

In theaters on March 16, 2022, director Ilan Klipper returns just one year after his documentary The Walking Dead with The Peace Process, a comedy starring Camille Chamot and Damien Bonnard.

The two actors portray Marie and Simon, who are deeply in love despite the constant bickering in their lives. In order not to be separated, they embark on a slightly crazy adventure: to make a list of rules that they will have to follow at all costs. They call it the Universal Couple Bill of Rights.

Origin of the project

The idea for the film arose from the following question: What do you do when you love each other and can’t stand each other anymore? It was during the meeting of Ilan Clipper and Camille Shamus, who had already worked together in The Starry Sky Above My Head and Funambules, that the project was born.

“Camille confides in me about my desire to write a screenplay called ‘La Paix.’ He wanted to start with this idea that in a world that is already hard enough and where you want a little peace when you come home, the war continues. At home, those who share your life!

We were both a couple, asking the same questions. We discussed the whole evening. Then we started meeting regularly to talk about it and started writing.”– says the film director.

The couple’s charter

To save their couple, Marie and Simon draw up a charter with a list of rules to follow. What the duo used in the film is inspired by Camille Shamu’s experience with her companion, whom she spent 15 days without uttering a single word under penalty of separation.

Subsequently, this charter was actually formed during a meeting with a friend of the actor, who called Co-parents, a dating site, to become parents. It binds people who want to reproduce without being a couple or living together, and establishes a statute that sets the rules between two parents even before a child is born.

“It clicked with us right away. We also captured, as in the film, the moment when he explained to us that most people who have children, fascinated by a love story, do not think above how they are going to raise them.

And when the baby comes, the problems pile up, because suddenly you realize that the two visions are different!”Ilan Clipper explains.

I prefer comedy

Ilan Clipper preferred to explore the topic of family issues through comedy rather than drama. It clicked for the director, who had been writing dramas for a long time, when he started writing a comedy project with Vincent Dietsch. If that didn’t work, he felt like continuing to write in that registry.

For the filmmaker, it was important to write comedies to have fun and make life even more fun. The artist did not want to write jokes, but to draw situations and characters that make us notice, smile at our existential problems.

“That’s why the alliance with Camille was perfect. The idea of ​​a comedy came up even more spontaneously for the peace process, because I didn’t want to shoot a couple’s fight in the first degree, without humor. It would be very believable.”Ilan Clipper emphasizes.

The Peace Process was released in theaters on June 14.