Monte-Cristo: Coached for an apnea scene, Pierre Niney reveals the cheating of Hollywood stars
The French actor knows how Kate Winslet or Tom Cruise managed to spend more than five minutes underwater without breathing.
Their series Fiasco just arrived on Netflix, so Pierre Niney And Geraldine Nakache participated, with humor obviously, in the last Floodcast by Florent Bernard and Adrien Ménielle. In addition to revealing what was the main source of inspiration for this comedy telling how a historic film shoot turns into a nightmare, Pierre Niney returned to a double experience of shooting underwater.
Explaining that he was very poorly coached for The Odysseythe biopic of Jean-Jacques Cousteau directed by Jérôme Salle – a shoot which could have turned into a tragedy due to the lack of attention of his diving trainer! – Pierre Niney details having to film an aquatic sequence shot to the count of Monte Cristothe adaptation of the classic work of Alexandre Dumas by Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière.
“I did fencing, horse riding, which I had never really done, and freediving. With the world freediving champion, it was very cool. Freediving, I I loved it, I want to do it again. Besides, I'm going to talk there and I'll never catch my breath until the end of the show (laughs).
Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation.
“I'm taking two minutes to tell you this, resumes Niney more seriously. The world freediving champion came to the swimming pool, I did 1 minute 20 underwater, which wasn't great, and there he gave me tips, four tips to apply in the pool where we were. I did all four, I said to myself: 'I'll save 20 seconds…', and there I did 3 minutes 40 on my second apnea. No, I won’t tell you his tips!”
“I got this thing (the phenomenon of “second breath”editor’s note) when you say to yourself: 'It's hot, it's hot, it's hot!'but if you managed your preparation well, you still have 30 seconds left, or even potentially 1 minute, 1 minute 30. I was fascinated by stories from film sets, like Avatarwhere they tell us things like: 'Kate Winslet did 6 minutes7 minutes of apnea, Tom Cruise too…' So, very quickly, I told him: 'The Americans are mythos, it's not possible to do 7 minutes of apnea…' and then he said to me: 'Actually, it's true and not true.' The time is true, but what is very different from what he does – he does pure apnea – is that they take pure oxygen before the dive. In fact, you double your time. They take it just before, I imagine they breathe with it 2 or 5 minutes before, with pure oxygen in a bottle, and when they go, they double the apnea time. I didn't do that. The scene actually required 1 minute 30 minutes of breath-holding.
(…)
It's the escape scene, we tried to do it in a sequence shot, and we succeeded, it was cool. To do this, I had to dive into a pit enclosed in a bag, and manage to open the bag which was tied up. It was the scariest thing of my life!”
Join us from June 28 to discover this new adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo for the cinema. Here is its trailer:
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