Green Shutters: Death, Difficult Financing… Revisiting the Genesis of This Film with Depardieu

The birth of the project (turbulent).

Les Volets vert was adapted from the novel of the same name by Georges Simenon and was published in 1950 by Les Presses de la Cité. First of all, Gerard Depardieu, speaking in the summer of 2017, advised Michel and Laurent Pettin to read this book.

Producers then chose to option the rights to the book with its author’s son, John Simenon, and then called on Jean-Loup Dabadie to adapt it. The famous director wrote the first draft of the script, but he died in May 2020.

Bertrand de Laby, Dabadie and Depardieu’s agent, then offers Michel and Laurent Pétin at the request of Jean Becker, who happily accepts. Canal+ was very quick to agree to the project, but France Télévisions, which has always financed the director’s films, is skeptical:

“In the relationship between Majin and Alice, they see an ambiguity that worries them and that no one can remove from our arguments. Therefore, their absence is our own joint”, recalls Michel and Laurent Pettin. Filming may begin in August 2021.

A legendary couple

Fanny Ardan and Gerard Depardieu have played together ten times. For Jean Becker, they refer to the very famous couples of actors who existed at one time, such as Simon Valéry and Jean Desailles, Madeleine Reno and Jean-Louis Barot or Delphine Seyrig and Sami Frey. He specifies:

“In life, Depardieu feels a deep love for Fanny Ardan. So their complicity in life is also found in the film, and it doesn’t need to be explained. In Les Volets Verts, he acts as he does towards her because he feels that he is going to run away from her.”

The same car as Piccolo!

In homage to Jean-Loup Dabadie and the Saute years, producer Laurent Pettin insisted that the character of Felix (played by Benoit Polvorde) drives the same Alfa Romeo as Michel Piccol in Les Choses de la vie (1970).

Choice of the 70s

If the story of the novel takes place in the 1950s, Jean Becker chose to place the film in the 1970s. He justifies this choice: “At first, the story was set in modern times, but I told it by reading the book. If it were impossible for me, the lives of today’s actors have nothing to do with these monuments of previous generations, as is the case with Majin, the character in Georges Simenon’s book.

Fishing sequence

Originally, Jean-Loup Dabadie envisioned a game of bowls (as the film takes place in the South) instead of the fishing scene between Depardieu and Polvorde. But that didn’t sit well with Jean Becker, who says:

“I was thinking of a scene I had experienced. One day, in Casamance, I went fishing on the open sea in a boat with four seats in the back. We exchanged our seats, as if to distribute the fortunes.

“And it came to pass that I caught the first fish, and then I caught some in four places, and the other three caught nothing, which annoyed them to the core.”