Discover one of the stunts that required Pierre Niney to do some very serious training on “The Count of Monte Cristo”… which didn’t stop him from joking on set!
Canal+ is broadcasting The Count of Monte Cristo with Pierre Niney this Sunday at 9 p.m., one of the biggest hits at the French box office, which is currently creating a surprise in the United States. In this film, the actor who won a César for Yves Saint Laurent gave of himself to perform the best possible stunts, including one that made him break out in a cold sweat… and a little laugh!
Underwater and without cutting
It takes place a little before the first hour of the film, when Edmond Dantès managed to get himself out of If prison by taking the place of a dead man. Thrown in a weighted bag from the top of a cliff, he finds himself trapped underwater. He must free himself from the bag to reach the surface in apnea. To add to the challenge that this represents, directors Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte – with the actor’s agreement – decide that the filming will be done without cutting: in a sequence shot, according to the technical term.
Contrary to what one might believe – and we must congratulate the film crew, because it is not visible – this swimming scene was not filmed in the sea but entirely indoors, at Lites Water Studio in Belgium . Pierre Niney is therefore under close surveillance on D-day, because he is the star of the film, and his termination following a failed stunt would be extremely detrimental, costing the production a fortune.
The rest is told by the directors (via Jerry Talks):
It’s the plan that’s in the film, (…) ends up coming out of the bag and he has a sort of uneasiness. Except that he hadn’t warned us about the discomfort. And it was a take where he had asked for the bag to be particularly tight, so that it would be really physically difficult for him to open it. It’s a huge pool, we were very far apart. (…) So we were on our chairs, we got up like that and said to ourselves and by the time we reacted, he left again saying to us [avec un clin d’oeil] : ‘you saw, it wasn’t bad!’ A joke to sugarcoat it all, but Pierre Niney admitted that behind the scenes of this diving event required a lot of effort from him (via Konbini):
“We have an escape scene that we wanted to be impressive and realistic, so we wanted a sequence shot where I could stay underwater for a little while while moving in a state of panic [ce qui fait] consume your oxygen quickly. And at 15 meters deep, weighted down, we still had to (…) find a level of serenity. I trained with the world freediving champion [Stéphane Mifsud].”
To our colleagues at Version Femina, he even added: “Despite the safety divers, it was scary”.
It took the most drastic training and a lot of practice so that, so to speak, the matter was in the bag!
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