How was the series Cœurs Noirs filmed?
Director Ziad Doueiri explains to us how he thought about directing his series in immersion with the French special forces in Iraq…
It’s a military thriller of formidable effectiveness, which begins this evening on France 2. After its broadcast on Prime Video last year, Black Hearts arrives in clear to tell the story of the immersion of this group of French Special Forces in Iraq. The six episodes were directed by Ziad Doueiri. A Lebanese filmmaker, trained in the United States at the Tarantino school, he tells Première how he thought about the impressive production of this new series of extreme intensity:
“I had never done that so I had to take responsibility. From the start, I told myself that this should not be an internalized series, but on the contrary very visual. I wanted us to be in the action, with this group stuck in a very delicate situation”, tells us the director, who emphasizes that the filming did not take place in Iraq – for obvious security reasons. It is in Morocco that Ziad Doueiri set up his cameras to film the action of the hunt, and more precisely near Casablanca and around Marrakech.
“This is not a series about the morality of war” continues the filmmaker. “We approach the subject, but we are in something much more dynamic. I have already made feature films in this sense or even the Baron Noir series (of which he directed the first 12 episodes) which was really oriented towards something political, psychological. This was a challenge for me, and I enjoyed it.”
To better immerse yourself in the world of the French army, Ziad Doueiri spent some time with the real French Special Forces near Bayonne, history of “become familiar with their operation, know their room for maneuver”. With this deep-rooted idea of filming a form of reality”even if it remains a fiction“. A compass that Ziad Doueiri followed even in its staging, filming with a hand-held camera, “which I never do, to tell from an inside point of view…”
The director even went so far as to invent a virtual journalist, who does not exist in the series, filming as if a major reporter were there, up close with these soldiers. : “I imagined that the Special Forces had accepted the request of a journalist, who would come and shoot an immersive report, accompanying them on this mission. Black Hearts is therefore filmed from the point of view of this journalist who we never see...”
Black Hearts, season 1 in 6 episodes to watch on France Télévisions and Prime Video.
