Visitors to TF1: The film has almost never seen the light of day

He speaks Sabir, half Latin, half Old French., Analyzes the inner Bowen performed by Didier Benuro when he first met Godfrey de Montmireil, directly from the time of Louis VI Le Grosse, and landed in 1992 at Les Visiteurs. However, this language, invented in part for the film, hardly saw the light of day like the rest of the film as we know it.

During the development of the project and especially its financing, the duo of screenwriters Christian Clavier / Jean-Marie Poirier. Facing a major setback: Producer Alain Terzian has a huge reluctance to agree with this now major element of the film.

“The fact that they could speak Old French was very scary for Terzian”– says Christian Clavier in a rich documentary The guests re-visited. Paraphrasing the producer’s words, he says:

How do you expect young people in the suburbs to go and see a film in that language? The Middle Ages are the most expensive, it’s not the funniest, it’s the language you do not understand, take it all out, it will be much easier to make a movie.

“We had to fight a lot with Christian to paint it in Old French”Confirms Jean-Marie Poirier. ”And it’s really old French that exists, I had a hard time finding (…) a dictionary for academics and spent hours searching for words that sounded good, such as elasticity, nonsense, and we could understand. …) I think it talked to a lot of people and made the children very happy. “

When the film comes out, the latter will really exchange visitor rows on the playing field, which will contribute to the film’s popularity and its record reception. In addition to the fact that Terzian wants to cut out not only Old French, but all the scenes of the Middle Ages, which is absurd for Poirier:

“If you start with the costumes of two actors going on the road (…), everyone will say, ‘OK, these are two extra TV shows that went with their costumes.’

Alain Terzian is a very lovable and funny person who I like very much. Surpassed Poirier, “But he’s just like all producers. He enjoys the scene of two people talking in a room rather than the 5,000 extra scenes of crossing a boat into a dock or crashing a plane.”Emphasizes with humor before continuing:

“I’ve always heard the producers say, ‘This is not so funny.’

Christian Clavier, still in the documentary Les Visiteurs revisités, notes that cutting out the medieval part of the film would not make sense and would damage the film:

It is here that you realize that a financier could be completely opposed to the ideas of the artists, because if he did that, the film would no longer hold water.

“So we had a very difficult discussion for three or four months before Gumon made a decision and gave us a start, starting with a bigger budget.”Tells a comic book actor. “Because whoever says medieval says costumes, horses, exteriors and it’s a lot more expensive for us to be able to make a movie like we thought.”.

We have to admit that their vision was right, as Les Visiteurs gathered 13.78 million French cinemas when it came out, far ahead of other successes of the year, such as Aladdin (second, 7.3 million tickets), Jurassic. Park, Germinal and Fugitive.

Two sequels were created, in 1997 The Visitors 2: The Corridors of Time, then in 2016, The Visitors – The Revolution. He also starred in the American remake of Sad Memory, The Visitors in America, co-starring John Hughes with Jean Reno and Christian Clavier, as well as Christina Applegate, Matt Ross, Tara Reed, and Malcolm McDowell.