On the occasion of the release of “The Count of Monte Cristo”, directed by Pierre Niney, here are five things to know about the film.
What is it about ? Victim of a conspiracy, young Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day for a crime he did not commit. After fourteen years of detention in the Château d’If, he manages to escape. Having become immensely rich, he returns under the identity of the Count of Monte Cristo to take revenge on the three men who betrayed him.
Who directs?
The Count of Monte Cristo is written and directed by the duo Alexandre De La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte, screenwriters on the lucrative diptych The Three Musketeers, adapted from another work by the writer Alexandre Dumas. The first explains: “What I love passionately is the prodigious mixture of genres that he has achieved. Because The Count of Monte Cristo is at once an adventure novel, a love story, a tragedy, a thriller, a human and political comedy, and the interaction of these genres releases a breath that is by turns romantic, funny, ironic or frightening.”
“As for Edmond Dantès, he escapes literature; he belongs to mythology, to an almost fantastic universe. There is in his character and his story an extra soul, a rather inexplicable poetry.”
To note that Le Comte de Monte Cristo has been the subject of about thirty transpositions on the small and big screen. The most recent, The Count of Monte Cristo with Jim Caviezel, dates from 2002, while the mini-series by Josée Dayan with Gérard Depardieu remains one of the most famous. Furthermore, the budget of the blockbuster is estimated at 43 million euros. For comparison, The Three Musketeers D’artagnan cost 36 million, as did its sequel Milady.
Adaptation difficile
The primary obsession of Alexandre De La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte was to preserve all the dimensions of this literary fresco, to make the viewer experience very different emotions. The directors confide: “That’s why we made a single film, and not a diptych: like the page-turner that the novel constitutes, the whole story had to take place in the same time frame, the tension built up in the first part of the film had to find its outcome in the same work. It’s impossible to say to the viewer: leave the Château d’If and come back in six months to find out what happens next!”
“The Count of Monte Cristo is 1,300 pages in folio, or between 3,000 and 4,000 pages of screenwriting, when a screenplay has 140… It’s as if someone opened a library to you in allowing you to choose just one book! An extremely exciting but dizzying gymnastic exercise, which represented three years of writing and preparation. Another difficulty was to make the idea that it is possible not to recognize someone credible. one that we haven’t seen for twenty years. It was possible at the time of Dumas, when photography was in its infancy. It’s much more difficult for our era saturated with images.
“Hence our initial questioning: should we take the same actor for both periods of his life? And if we take the same actor, how can we justify to the contemporary public that no one recognizes him.”
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Bastien Bouillon, Anaïs Demoustier and Pierre Niney
Preparation for Pierre Niney
During his two and a half months of filming, Pierre Niney “spent 150 hours sitting in a chair doing makeup” (a physical transformation session lasted four to six hours). For the rest, the actor, who had never ridden for a film, underwent special preparation to know how to ride. He remembers : “I also took a lot of fencing lessons, especially with Bastien Bouillon, who plays Fernand de Morcerf, to avoid getting stabbed in the eye in the first minute!”
“I invested a lot of time with the stuntmen in this fight, so that it would start off quite cleanly and become increasingly charged with anger, rage, with more organic, more trashy blows. Finally, for the credibility of the escape scene, I took freediving lessons with Stéphane Mifsud, world champion of static freediving, to be able to play the shot of the sinking bag in the continuity. It was undoubtedly the most frightening and exciting challenge in the film. Being tied up in a weighted bag at a depth of 15M…”
“There was a moment when I said to myself: Is this really reasonable? Pathé’s first reaction when they received the rushes was: “Reassure us: You didn’t have Pierre do this for real?”
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Who for Mercedes?
Pierre Niney and Anaïs Demoustier had played together in Sauver ou périr. The actress, who plays Mercédès, explains: “I had heard of the character of Monte Cristo and his thirst for revenge, but I had not read the novel. Discovering the work through the screenplay ultimately saved me from having to mourn the idea that we inevitably have of the adaptation of a work that we know. I approached the screenplay of Alexandre et Matthieu like a classic screenplay, asking myself why this story and the role of Mercédès interested me.”
“At the time, I didn’t associate her with another character, but thinking about it, she has something of Meryl Streep from The Bridges of Madison County. She’s a woman who carries within her a form of resignation, sadness, acceptance of what her life is ultimately. A theme that I find overwhelming.”
Cinematic references
In terms of visual references, Alexandre De La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte cite The Leopard and The Godfather, particularly for the importance of color. The first specifies: “Like Hitchcock who shot his thriller Death on the Trail in the vibrant landscapes of the Midwest, we wanted to bathe a dark film like The Count of Monte Cristo in the light of summer, between the blue of the sky and that of the sea, with the idea that this stifling side provided an ideal setting for revenge. Without even mentioning the theme of identity theft, this also brings us closer to Plein soleil.
The second adds: “I have very strong childhood memories of great Technicolor films from the 50s and 60s, from The Red Shoes to Lawrence of Arabia. For Monte Cristo, it seemed important to me to return to these flamboyant cinema images that gave me immense pleasure as a spectator.”
