Samy Naceri will direct his first film

25 years after Taxi, the actor goes behind the camera for an eminently personal project.

We all remember Samy Naceri aboard his Peugeot 406 in the saga Taxi, which made him a national star. This phenomenal success will nevertheless lead to the fall of the actor, who will have difficulty finding good roles in the 2010s, finding himself notably ousted from Taxi 5 in 2018, directed by Franck Gastambide. Samy Naceri will also experience many legal setbacks during these years, with car accidents, domestic violence and sexual exhibitions and insults.

Samy Naceri: “I don’t see why we wouldn’t do a lot of Taxi”

The actor will however pass for the first behind the camera with LOLadapted from a short story by Eric Atlan, one of his friends: “This is the story of a wealthy landowner who is jealous of everyone. His wife is cheating on him, they want to steal his loot and he is buried alive. He goes up to heaven and he sees his father, whom I also interpret, who tells him to come back down. So he has a Near Death Experience and he comes back to settle his accounts.”, he says in the program Clique with Mouloud Achour. Passing behind the camera at 61 was not in the actor’s small papers at the start: “It fell on me. Eric Atlan, who is an old friend with whom I made my debut in the cinema, showed me this short story, we had it adapted by my brother Bibi, and he said to me: “Why don’t you realize?” I said okay.”

Samy Naceri absent from Taxi 5: the actor gives his version of the facts

In the casting of his first feature film, we can therefore find Samy Naceri himself, as well as Chantal Ladesou and Jean-Marie Bigard. “I think there is a kind of renaissance if you can put it that way. Anyway, I was away for quite a while. There are movies that haven’t been released because of the Covid, so I have 4 movies to come, but I’m even hungrier than before. I want to go back to where I was. I miss it so I’m going (…) I struggled because of several reasons: hearsay, pitfalls, false rumors… Lots of things. And when I look around me, I see that there are many artists who have gone through a bad patch like me and at some point something happens and you have to go there and take the bull by the horns.” he tells Mouloud Achour about his difficult journey.

LOL is expected to begin filming by the end of August. The film currently has no French release date.