We didn’t tell each other all this on MyCANAL: Mark Levy confides in the adaptation of his novel

Fans of Mark Levy novels will be delighted!

So what if it was true, where are you? Or at least My Friends, My Love, another Mark Levy bestseller is on the screen. From this Tuesday, July 19, fans of the successful novelist will discover the same adaptation of all these things that we have not told each other on the Canal + Series platform and also on MyCanal.

The plot revolves around Julia Saurel, played by actress Alexandra Maria Lara, who receives a call three days before her wedding informing her that her father Michel (Jean Reno) will not be at the wedding. Not so surprising when we know that Julia has had a distant relationship with her father for many years. However, Michelle has a very good excuse this time, and for good reason, she’s dead!

But on the day after her funeral, an unreal surprise awaits Julia. Indeed, the latter will have an unexpected opportunity to make one last trip with his father to make up for lost time and finally say everything he never said to each other. Fantastic and exciting story directed by Miguel Courtois.

Mark Levy, who he met at the Monte Carlo Festival last June, told us the story of writing his bestseller, his role as an actor and also. The importance of the concept of freedom in his work.

Allocine: A Novel Everything we haven’t told each other Released in 2008. What is the story behind writing this book and what inspired you?

Mark Levy: It was born out of a story I had with my mom in her car. I was on the phone with my older son, who was 10 or 11 at the time. When I hung up, I said something very banal: “I love you later.” Then there was ten seconds of silence in the car. My mom was staring at the steering wheel and I heard her say, “My dad never told me he loved me.” I turned around and said “but he loves you”. However, he did not answer. It was amazing because my grandfather was long dead and I saw a scar in my mother’s eyes that never healed.

It opened up for me a field of exploration and understanding of a relationship that I had never known, that of a father and his daughter. I must say that I found this topic fascinating. The more I listened to friends tell me about their relationship with their father, the more I was fascinated by modesty and the unsaid. I think that’s how the idea of ​​Julia’s second chance was born.

What prompted the adaptation of this novel for television?

Of all the projects that I have managed to implement in my life, the most rewarding are human relationships. The project was born during a lunch with Miguel Courtois, with whom we had already worked Where are you ? In 2005, we remembered the fun we had while writing and filming. We’d be crazy not to do this together again. And then I don’t know if Miguel called me or me, but when we talked, he said, “Why don’t you adapt All the things we didn’t tell you. And we started! Miguel started writing, he sent me the script soon after. I immediately got into dialogues and then everything went quite quickly.

You are a screenwriter, showrunner, producer, but also an actor of a series. Was there a desire on your part to lend your qualities to any of your characters?

A little strange thing happened. Miguel has always liked to give small roles to his friends in his long career as a filmmaker. I was a gas station attendant, a gynecologist, a publisher, but it was always small roles. While writing, Miguel calls me and says “You should play Julia’s best friend”.

You might think it’s schizophrenic, but when you’re a writer, you spend months with fictional characters who really come into your life and never leave. Julia was one of them. And suddenly, the director asks you to play the best friend of one of your heroes, who will be played by the actor himself.

To me it was a bit like Alice through the looking glass. I told myself that I was going to bring my characters to life in real life, and this offers me the opportunity to interact with one of them. I think that’s what put my finger in the gear and made me say to myself, “Come on, I’m going.” I have to say it was amazing.

The series deals with universal themes such as mourning, marriage or even father-son relationships. The topic of freedom is equally important. Is this an important concept to you?

This is the red thread of my 23 novels. Everything I have done in life, I have done for the love of freedom. I went abroad very young, traveled around the world, joined the Red Cross. I never wanted to belong to an environment to be exactly free. really. So, freedom does not mean not being responsible to others, on the contrary. It’s strange, but it includes more. I have always had a thirst for freedom. Having no lies in life is an extraordinary freedom.

Adapting a literary work to the screen is never easy and often involves both rejection and modification. In Everything We Didn’t Say, Anthony becomes Michel and the story takes place in, say, Paris and Bruges instead of New York and Montreal. What drives these kinds of choices and what role do you play in these decisions?

Mainly production constraints. The characters in the novel are Americans. At the time I wrote, the rather violent reaction of Julia’s father, who forbade his daughter to live in East Berlin, despite the fall of the wall, was a result of the Cold War that had gripped America since the end of World War II. war until the 1990s, and which ultimately became more culturally ingrained in the minds of Americans than in the French. If only because the distance made the phantasmagoria even stronger. In the United States, there was real hatred for the Soviet Union, which was seen as the enemy. The concept of communism was a kind of crime or treason. There was indeed a huge political, cultural and social shock.

So in the book, when Michel goes so violently to find his daughter in East Berlin, the question doesn’t even arise. That’s why I had this choice as a novelist. As long as you adapt a TV series, if the characters are American, it becomes an American TV series. You must write the script in American. It must be funded in the United States. In short, everything becomes very complicated. By setting it in France, it was the director’s talent to make these characters French. It was he who decided to take Alexandra Maria Lara. It was he who came up with the idea to make Julia the daughter of an East German fleeing communism. Something that does not exist in history at all. This invention alone changed Julia’s father’s motivation when he was an American.