Serious Profession: Did this movie about teaching take place in a real college?

What is it about? returned to school. A new school year at the college featuring Pierre, Meryem, Fouad, Sophie, Sandrine, Alix and Sofiane, a group of dedicated and united teachers. They are joined by Benjamin, a young substitute teacher who has no experience and quickly encounters the difficulties of the profession. Through contact with them, he discovers how much the passion for teaching remains alive in a weakened institution.

A “normal” college

Thomas Lilty wanted to lead a serious profession in a “normal” college that we hardly ever see on TV anymore: there are hundreds of such middle-class institutions with socially mixed populations: “My fictional college is neither a difficult college nor an elite college. I didn’t want to make a ‘serious job’ film about a particular teaching method, but a film about the teaching profession.”

“To project myself in this college, where we can all identify, is to touch a form of universality. A serious profession is not a film about ‘doing’, but a film about ‘being’. Filming in a college during school is very difficult. So I recreated the college by bringing together three different places: The exterior at the college in Meudon, the classrooms in the abandoned college in Vitry-sur-Seine and finally the teachers’ room and administration at the college in Pantin.

Changing the registry

After Hippocrates, the country doctor, the first year, and the Hippocratic series, which focuses on the devotion of caregivers, Thomas Lilt responds to the otherworldly description of teaching. The filmmaker explains: “With Hippocrates, the village doctor, in the first year, the form of the trilogy appeared, almost in spite of me.”

“So even if the TV series Hippocrates, the first part of the third season of which I just finished filming, took up a large part of my time, I knew that my return to cinema would be around a world other than medicine. Serious. Profession, group film, narratively a little fragmented , will be similar to my previous feature films because I will approach fiction through reality.”

“But also, and above all, because of my desire to continue questioning the question of commitment through the profession. The commitment of educators has been at the center of my work for more than ten years, I wanted to be interested in teachers. How can we. We find meaning in the practice of a profession that is increasingly Is he criticizing more, getting poorer, decreasing?”

“Telling the story of the life of a group of professors at the college then made me want to wonder to better understand what makes their profession so special. Where do they find the motivation to teach in this impoverished, weakened institution? What students were they? What parents did they become? What about their profession? “

Immersion in teaching

As usual, Thomas Lilly did a lot of research into the environment he described. Before writing the first line of the script, the filmmaker read (and watched) as many documents as possible about teaching (mostly testimonials): “I watch TV shows, TV news, community magazines, but I also read blogs, magazines, sociology essays…I gradually immerse myself in the subject. On the other hand, I never get inspiration from ‘artistic works.’

“This long preparatory work allows me to gradually look at my playing field, as if I knew it myself. Only from this moment can heroes be born. They are usually more or less mixed explorers between me, the actor. Or the actor I am thinking of and my The characters seen in the documentary work. I think the realism comes from this approximate fusion. And the work on the set goes in that direction as well.”

4 star cast

With serious work, Thomas Lilty reminded many actors with whom he has already filmed. This is the case of Francois Clouse, Vincent Lacoste and William Lebgill. He explains: “It’s like seeing close friends you haven’t heard from in a while. That simple thought was a source of stimulation and inspiration when writing the script. Knowing them so well allows me to put a lot of them into my characters. .”

“But there are also many actors who are part of ‘my’ family and whom you can see in each of my films or TV series. They are often secondary characters, but they are faithful traveling companions. I think that Sylvie Lachat, Theo Navarro, Mustafa Aburachid, Michael Perez, Christophe Ntakabaniura, Jose Laprun, Geraldine Sheeter, Hubert Mayon… We find them from one film to another and they greatly contribute to the atmosphere of my films.”

“And then, more rationally, I found that there was consistency in bringing together my young intern from Hippocrates, my country doctor and my first-year students in a new story. I wanted to form an intergenerational group in this way, because it brought a universal. dimension to the profession. I wanted to show , that the problems of a 60-year-old teacher are closer to the problems of a 25-year-old teacher than of a seventy-year-old who will practice another profession.

A Serious Profession: “Real Immersion in the Everyday Life of Teachers” with Adele Exarchopoulos and Vincent Lacoste

Leave room for the actors

For a serious profession, Thomas Lilty wanted to devote as much space as possible to actors. Thus, the director chose longer and longer shots without cutting the cameras: “There are always two. And I make sure that all the actors can shoot at any time. My goal is to completely forget about the equipment, despite the weight of the crew. The set should remain a playground for the actors.”

“I remember the disciplinary board sequence, which I had to shoot in several small parts, but I ended up shooting it in one big sequence, as if it was a real disciplinary board. I started “40 minutes into the action cut. He tried. For the cast and crew working without a grid, it was especially physically hell for the pole operators.”The director confides.