On the screen, Émile, “young man condemned by a form of early Alzheimer’s” is played by Hugo Becker, and Joanne by Camille Lou, already associated in the series “I promise you”. In the production, Maurice Barthélémy, revealed by the crazy humor of Robin Hood, does not force the effects to show the emerging alchemy between the two characters.
An astonishing journey for this work, which started from nothing, namely the first attempts at writing by a high school student from the Mâcon region, from a modest background.
Role of policeman
“When I started this novel, I was 17 years old. And I wanted to write a beautiful love story around travel, an ode to freedom,” said Mélissa Da Costa during the presentation of the film to the press. She completed it at the age of 27, and for lack of anything better, self-published on Amazon, under the title “Searching for a travel companion for the ultimate escapade”. The novel was spotted by a small publisher which no longer exists today, Carnets Nord, and which published it under its new title in 2019. Then reprinted in paperback in 2020.
Mélissa Da Costa, at 30, then sold the adaptation rights to a production company, En car Simone. “It’s hard to believe now, but at the time not many people were interested in my book,” she remembers. How can we anticipate the overwhelming success of “All the blue in the sky”, driven by word of mouth, and its pretty cover, where a miniature Volkswagen van emerges from the grass?
“When I write it, I don’t even think about publication,” confides the author. A few years later, here she is playing the role of a police officer in the film. “It was funny. Moving on to makeup, hair… The many takes we had to do… It was a lot of fun for me.”
-Long queues
Maurice Barthélémy is next to her during this scene, where they check the vehicle's papers. “I wanted to find the van that was on the cover,” he says. The bet to use the same model, an orange Combi, caused some mechanical problems on set. But it will speak to the many fans of this gifted woman.
For the second year in a row, Mélissa Da Costa was the best book seller in France in 2024. She sold nearly 1.2 million novels over the year, compared to 1.1 million for Guillaume Musso.
Being so widely read, generating long queues at each meeting with the public, being presented with multiple projects for adaptations of one's fiction, “all of this was a fantasy, which one can play out when one begins to write” , underlines the novelist.
Next step: crossing the borders. “All the Blue in the Sky” experienced, reports this mother of two young children, “a dazzling success upon its release in the Netherlands, where I was absolutely not known. In Italy it works well… I went to Canada at the end of November and beginning of December, telling myself that it was going to be cooler than in France. It wasn’t that much: there was a community of readers waiting for me.”
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