‘I spent 150 hours sitting on a chair’: Pierre Nini’s grueling physical training to play the Count of Monte Cristo

What is it about? Conspiracy victim Edmond Dantes, a young man, is arrested on his wedding day for a crime he did not commit. After fourteen years of imprisonment at Chateau d’If, he managed to escape. Vastly enriched, he returns as the Count of Monte Cristo to seek revenge on the three men who betrayed him.

who is in charge

The Count of Monte Cristo is written and directed by the duo Alexandre de la Patelier and Mathieu Delaporte, screenwriters of the lucrative diptych The Three Musketeers, adapted from another work by writer Alexandre Dumas. The first explains: “What I love passionately is the amazing mix of genres that he achieved. Because The Count of Monte Cristo is at the same time an adventure novel, a romance novel, a tragedy, a thriller, a human and political comedy and an interplay. From these genres comes the romantic, the funny, the ironic or dangerous breathing.”

“As for Edmond Dantes, he escapes literature; he belongs to mythology, almost to a world of fantasy. There is an excess of soul in his character and in his story, a rather inexplicable poetry.”

to celebrate The Count of Monte Cristo There were about thirty transposition subjects on small and large screens. The most recent, The Revenge of Monte Cristo with Jim Caviezel, dates back to 2002, and Jose Dian’s mini-series with Gerard Depardieu remains one of the most famous. In addition, the budget of the blockbuster is estimated at 43 million euros. By comparison, The Three Musketeers d’Artagnan cost 36 million, as did its sequel, Milady.

difficult adaptation

Alexandre de la Patelliere and Mathieu Delaporte’s primary obsession was to preserve all the dimensions of this literary mural, to experience the different emotions of the viewer. Directors trust: “That’s why we made one film and not a diptych: like the attribute of a page that represents a novel, the whole story had to take place in the same period of time that the tension in the first part of the film was tense. finds its result in the same work, it is impossible to tell the audience: leave the Chateau d’If and come back in six months to find out what happens next!

“The Count of Monte Cristo is 1,300 pages in a folio, or 3,000 to 4,000 pages of screenplay, when the screenplay is 140… it’s as if someone opened the library and let you choose one book! Very exciting, but dizzying. A gymnastic exercise that represented three years of writing and To prepare, it was possible to believe someone we had not seen in twenty years. Photography was in its infancy. It is much more difficult for our image-saturated era.

“Hence our original question: Should we cast the same actor in both periods of his life, and if we cast the same actor, how can we justify to modern society that no one recognizes him?”

Preparations for Pierre Niney

During his two-month shoot, Pierre Nin “I sat on a chair for 150 hours doing makeup” (The physical transformation session lasted from four to six hours). For the rest, the actor, who has never walked for a film, underwent special training to walk. He recalls: “I also took quite a few fencing lessons, especially with Bastien Bouillon, who plays Fernand de Morcerf, so I wouldn’t stick a knife in my eye from the first minute!”

“I invested quite a lot in this fight with the stuntmen, so that it started out pretty clean and became more and more charged with anger, rage, more organic, trashy beats. Finally, for the credibility of the escape scene, I took freediving lessons with Stefan Mifsud, in static apnea, to be able to continuously play a dive shot at a depth of 15m…”

“There was a moment when I said to myself: it was really reasonable Pate’s first reaction when he got ‘Trust us: you really didn’t force him to do this?’

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Who for Mercedes?

Pierre Nin and Anais Demostier played together in Save or Perish. The actor who portrays Mercedes explains: “I had heard of the character of Monte Cristo and his thirst for revenge, but I had not read the novel. Discovering the work through the screenplay finally saved me from the idea that we definitely have an adaptation of the work. Knowing that, I approached the scenario of Alexander and Matthew as a classic scenario and asked myself how “interested” this story and Mercedes M.

“At the time, I didn’t associate her with any other character, but in thinking about it, she has something of a Meryl Streep on Madison Avenue. She’s a woman who carries within herself the resignation, the sadness, the melancholy. The acceptance of what is at the end of life.

Cinematographic references

In terms of visual references, Alexandre de la Patellier and Mathieu Delaporte cite the leopard and the godfather, especially for the importance of color. The first one states: “Like Hitchcock, who shot his thriller ‘Death on the Trail’ in the stark landscapes of the Midwest, we wanted to bathe a dark film like ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ in summer light, between the blue of the sky and the sea. With the idea that this suffocated side would be an ideal setting for revenge, not to mention the theme of identity theft, it also brings us close to Plein soleil.

Another adds: “I have very strong childhood memories of the great Technicolor films of the 50s and 60s, from The Red Slippers to Lawrence of Arabia. For Monte Cristo, it seemed important to return to these lush cinematographies that were ‘great crowd pleasers.’