Valérie Lemercier talks about the “complicated” filming of Visitors

The actress does not regret having played Béatrice de Montmirail, even if she does not have good memories of the filming.

Invited by Pierre Lescure to participate in the show Nice gesture, Valérie Lemercier was again asked about her mixed experience on Visitors, by Jean-Marie Poiré. If the comedy is one of the biggest successes of French cinema (with 13.8 million admissions recorded in France in 1993), the actress was not at ease on set.

“I am very happy to be in The Visitors, she answers today. It’s the filming, which was complicated.” She then explains that it was not the popularity of the film which embarrassed her and pushed her to refuse to return in the sequel, but rather the shots opposite Christian Clavier, Jean Reno and Marie-Anne Chazel, under the direction of Poiré.

“No, it’s not popularity, she explains. They call me Jacqouille in the street, that’s how it is. But I’m very happy to be in this film. It was the filming that was a bit difficult, but not the popularity of this film (Who) I like. It was a complicated shoot, maybe I was tired, maybe a mini-melon from having done a whole tour with a show. I didn’t have the same status as them. Before Corned Beef, I had never done anything, so in a way, I was a little surprise. So there you have it… Jean-Marie was not happy. He came to see me in the evening to say: ‘You’re not funny.’ Christian’s makeup artist said, upon seeing Marie-Anne Chazel arrive: ‘Finally a funny woman!’ There was a kind of thing where I had a kind of panic about not… I said to myself: ‘I don’t give them what they want. I’m not funny enough.’ In hindsight, what I tell myself is that the premise of this film is so crazy, that to convey crazy ideas, it is necessary, if everyone was disguised with trash bags, that everyone comes from the Middle Ages, a character who makes us believe in him.'”

The Visitors: 5 things you don’t know about the cult comedy

At the time, Valérie Lemercier was 28 years old, and she actually had little experience in front of a film camera when Jean-Marie Poiré called on her to play Béatrice de Montmirail/Frénégonde de Pouille. She had obtained supporting roles in Snowy in May, The Day After Tomorrow, Operation Corned Beef and Sweak exes, but it is thanks to his show performed on stage, in particular his sketch entitled The Foxthat Poiré had the idea of ​​offering him this role: “I knew that Valérie Lemercier would be perfect as Béa because I really liked, he confided to First in 2016. She already expressed herself there as her character, accentuating her side ‘Marie-Chantal’. She was very snobbish and at the same time capable of spouting outrageous things. In the sketch, for example, she exclaimed between two bourgeois allusions: ‘We found lots of long-lost cousins ​​on mom’s side, who have huge cocks!’. It was exactly this half-traditional, half-vulgar tone that I was looking for.”

A year later, she specified in our pages: “When it was necessary to adapt my upper-class character to the screen, it was complicated: I was wary of the role too much. So what I was proposing wasn’t very colorful.”

In 2008, it was in The world that Valérie Lemercier detailed her discomfort on the set of Visitors. She then explained that her embarrassment came partly from the fact that the director and the main actors knew each other very well: Clavier had filmed with him in Santa Claus is trash, Grandpa is resisting, My Best Friends etc., and he was in a relationship with Marie-Anne Chazel, the interpreter of Ginette. As for Jean Reno, he was the star ofOperation Corned Beefalready alongside Clavier and Lemercier, in 1991. “They all had dinner without me, separated me from Isabelle Nanty to whom I felt close, she remembers. When the makeup artist saw Marie-Anne Chazel arrive, she exclaimed: ‘Here’s finally a funny woman’“. She then preferred to refuse to play in the sequel. “We sometimes agree to make a film knowing only what it can give, did she justify to Teleramain 2007. But there, really, I didn’t feel it… And what happened next didn’t prove me wrong.” Eight years later, however, she assured Europe 1: “I love Béatrice de Montmirail! I always like playing bourgeois people. There will still be a lot of them in my shows. They are very amusing characters, because they doubt nothing.”

In 1998, Jean-Marie Poiré reteamed with the cast of Visitors for its continuation, The Corridors of Timewhich received more mixed reviews than the first opus, but was still a hit in theaters, attracting more than 8 million spectators, despite the crazy success of Titanic released a few weeks ago. Valérie Lemercier had left her place to Muriel Robin, who in turn had a bad time filming in the role of Béatrice de Montmirail. His comments on this experience can be read below.

The Visitors: Why Valérie Lemercier and Muriel Robin had a bad experience during the filming