To start the year 2025 as it should be, France 2 has decided to focus this Monday evening on its event series Shoresdirected by David Hourrègue and presented in preview during the last La Rochelle Fiction Festival organized last September.
The story of Rivages de France 2
This 6-episode mini-series, with a touch of fantasy, follows the adventures of Abigail, an oceanographer who returns to her hometown, Fécamps, to investigate the mysterious sinking of a trawler in the open sea and the disappearance of the sailors of this boat belonging to his father. But this return is far from easy for the heroine played by Fleur Geffrier, seen recently in Drops of God (Apple TV+/France 2). By returning to Fécamps, she faces a difficult past that she fled a few years earlier. “As his research progresses, new mysterious phenomena occur at sea, making the activity of fishermen, although essential to local life, impossible. Abigail will understand that these disasters could originate from an underwater presence capable of upsetting the fragile balance between man and nature…”writes France 2 in its synopsis.
Where were the sea scenes in Rivages filmed?
For this series, director David Hourrègue and his team set up shop in Fécamps. It was therefore there, in this Norman town, that the boat scenes at sea were filmed in conditions that were not always easy. It must be said that the filming took place in the middle of winter, between the months of November and December. “When the sea doesn't want you, it doesn't want you. We were lucky to have an absolutely insane team who, after a day where we had been thrown out of the sea twice, told us “No, guys, you won't make it, go back the third time”. Said like that, it seems like an epiphenomenon on a shoot, but when it's the English Channel, and its currents, and three-meter swells, it took a hell of a lot of courage to leave again.”explained David Hourrègue during the La Rochelle TV Fiction Festival. What Fleur Geffrier confirmed. “It doesn't take much to fall into the water and with very ambitious set-ups… We learned that adjusting two boats on the sea is good, but as soon as a third enters the game, that becomes very, very complicated. Sometimes the tide and the swell decide to go in different directions, and then you have to react very quickly.”.
The actors of Shores did they really dive into the sea?
To play Abigail, Fleur Pellerin took her boating license but she also learned scuba diving. Most of the underwater scenes were filmed at sea, in Corsica, in December. “In Corsica, we shot the scenes underwater, those in which we see the ground, the rocks, the environment”explained Fleur Geffrier while presenting the series. But certain scenes, and to avoid spoiling we will keep them secret for the moment, were filmed in a huge aquatic studio located in Brussels. It was in January 2024 that the team stormed, for a few days, the LITES studios which have already hosted the series Luther from Netflix or Germinal, the France 2 mini-series already produced by David Hourrègue. Opened in April 2019, this extraordinary place in Europe is the largest aquatic studio on the continent. It has, in particular, three film sets and two aquatic studios, one of the pools, with water heated to more than 30 degrees, is more than 10 meters deep. Thanks to cutting-edge technology, it is possible to recreate, in this studio, waves of more than one meter, wind, rain, storms or even different weather conditions using lighting. The floor of the basin can also tilt to film, for example, scenes of a boat sinking at sea. “There are very beautiful filtering systems, for color, but also for waste like dead leaves. We can throw them in to create darker water. For Germinal, We built mines which were sinking with the miners inside. We have already made supermarket stores, a house, a plane that had to tilt and then sink…”Karen Jensen, the co-owner of these studios with Wim Michiels, told us during our visit to the filming in Brussels. The latter plays an essential role since it is she who takes care of the team of divers securing each scene filmed in her studio. “We don’t realize the risks, and it’s up to us to warn them of these things”she concluded.
Rivages is this Monday evening at 9:05 p.m. on France 2
