by In an interview published in the quarterly Schnock magazine, the director Jean-Marie Poiré evokes his big clash which he had with Jean-Pierre Bacri on the set of the comedy “My best friends”. And who left traces at the actor …
We hardly present the director and screenwriter Jean-Marie Poiré, one of the absolute pillars of the French comedy for over forty years, to whom we owe some of the greatest successes of the genre: Father-Noël is a garbage, Grandpa makes resistance …
Released in January 1989 and coscenalized by his friend Christian Clavier (who plays naturally in it), his film My best friends will not be exactly an indoor triumph, with 358,394 admissions.
In absolute terms, many films would like to have such “failure”. Except that we must come from where we go. Grandpa made resistance, released six years earlier, had attracted 4.1 million spectators. The Twist Again comedy in Moscow, the previous Poiré film released in 1986, had attracted more than 1.36 million spectators, and it was already considered a semi failure.
“It was not a friendly shoot, it was very studious”
Widely written under the influence of the film Les Copains First by Lawrence Kasdan, the shooting of my best friends left a contrasting memory to its director, as he spanned at length in the last quarterly issue of Mook Schnock precisely devoted to the film. “It was not a friendly shoot, it was very studious” he warns.
A complicated and under tension shoot, especially with Jean-Pierre Bacri, who embodies a homosexual “Who has not been fucking since 1983”as he lets go in a replica, because of the ravages of AIDS in those years.
“I have a distant with Bacri. And yet, I fought so that he was in the film. I had loved him in the seventh target of Claude Pinoteau. One day, I yelled at him during a scene in front of the whole team. We could not get along on Guido, this homosexual who had not been going on since 1983. I wanted him to be more expressive.
Christian Fechner films
“Even today, I regret it, especially since I know that he had lived it very badly” says the filmmaker, 79 years old. “Years later, he went to a masterclass during Florent, I think, and we told him a lot about my best friends, which had annoyed him a little. He said on stage:” Poiré is a fucked! “He is that one of my friends was in the room and challenged him:” You can't say that, hey, he is a genius of comedy “.
Bacri replied: “It may be a genius, but it's a fucked one.” Years later, I was able to apologize. He was invited to a large live TV show, a 8 p.m. I think. A team had come to interview me, especially on this famous altercation during the shooting.
I had watched the camera and I said: “Jean-Pierre, I apologize to you. I adore you, I'm really stupid to have told you like that, I was annoyed, we were late, you are great in the film, and nothing justifies to have spoken like that”. Return antenna, Bacri wipes a tear. He died shortly afterwards. “
Emouvante anecdote concerning a brilliant actor with atrabilary puders, which is sorely lacking in French cinema.
