“I couldn’t even push my hand away”: Laurent Lafitte almost died on the set of this famous French film

Spoilers – Warning, the article below contains potential spoilers. If you do not want to know its contents, please do not read the following…

When you start a large-scale film production, it’s rare that certain scenes involve some risk and (on very rare occasions) the actors in particularly dangerous situations. So, while shooting an underwater scene for Abyss, director James Cameron almost died of drowning, or how on the set of Back to the Future 3, Michael J. Fox almost choked.

In 2017, during the filming of Albert Dupontel’s dramatic and historical comedy Au Revoir Là-haut, French actor Laurent Lafitte suffered a similar misfortune.

“I’m a bit claustrophobic and that was accentuated by the filming.”

Indeed, as he said last February Paradox microphone without filter (His statement was published recently tele-vacation), a sequence in which his character – the scheming Lieutenant Pradel – almost got too bad for the actor when he was buried alive in a pit. It is enough to significantly strengthen one of his main phobias:

“I’m a little claustrophobic. I was a little, but not much, and it got worse because of the filming. In Au Revoir Là-haut, Albert Dupontel’s film, I die buried under tons of sand.”– Lafitte confided.

“(…) It wasn’t sand, because that would have been too hard, it would have really crushed me, it was bits of cork, but there was a lot of it. (…) I was standing on a plate with jacks, I was buried under this ton of cork and I had to hold on for a few seconds on total apnea, I was everywhere, and then the platform came up and pulled me out of the pile of cork.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned, and for a few interminable seconds Laurent Lafitte wondered if he was going to suffer the same unfortunate fate as his character. Indeed, the platform that was supposed to bring him to the surface simply did not work.

“I was terribly nervous.”

“I understand that the system is not working, I am completely buried, I can’t even touch, it’s hard water, I can’t do anything and I don’t understand. (…) Panic movements upwards. And I’m completely petrified in a mass, unable to do anything, on apnea. And there, it was hollow, and they released my head so that I could breathe, and then they took me out with their hands, but I was afraid, in terrible agony. Obviously, it was the first shoot, I had to do it again later.”

(Re)discover our interview for “Au Revoir Là-haut”…