Lovers of French fiction, prepare yourself for a mind-blowing encounter when you get to know Tom and Lola, the heroes of the new France 3 series which begins broadcast this Tuesday, October 1. It’s simple, they’ll give you a welcome punch. A rhythm and an energy which are felt in the action of course but also in the tone, the direction, the music… All to serve well-crafted plots, interpreted by impeccable actors and embedded in superb natural settings which are not not unlike those of Marseille! Bad luck, for once, it’s not the Phocaean city!
Tom and Lola : Where is the new France 3 series filmed?
Direction the South where not the mistral blows but a fresh breeze called Tom and Lola, two friends who live in shared accommodation and are also, as if that were not enough, partners in the criminal police of La Seyne-sur-Mer, in the Var, just to change a little from the widely represented Phocaean city. “We visited a lot of sets, a year before starting and without knowing if France Télévisions was going to validate the project, explains Sébastien Pavard, the producer of the series met shortly before the launch. We went to Occitanie, in PACA, towards Martigues and after nine months we found a wasteland in La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon.” A wise choice according to Dounia Coesens, originally from Aix-en-Provence: “I was happy to go to that area, the region is beautiful and it’s an area that we see less on screen. We really take advantage and use the landscapes in the series.”
Seaside, open sea, cliffs, mountains… Everything benefits from a light that has nothing to envy of Marseille. The second episode even leads the duo to investigate near Toulon “in a real soap factory still in operation”, specifies the producer who is pleased to have installed teams and actors in the Var.
Tom and Lola : The actors return to school
One of the particularities unknown to the public is the particularity of the settings of Tom and Lola’s house and the police station where they work. “I worked in the studio when I was producing Pep’s and Our dear neighbors, begins Sébastien Pavard, but what I like is precisely… not the studios! It’s still nicer to see the characters in real life, isn’t it?” he asks rhetorically before telling an unexpected anecdote. “Lola’s house is a pretty crazy place in La Seyne-sur-Mer: it’s a former nursery school with three buildings where we also installed the production office and the HMC [habillage, maquillage, coiffures, autrement dit les loges, ndlr]. Their house is actually a classroom of this school, reveals the producer. At the end of the courtyard, there was an enormous fence which overlooked a building that had been abandoned for ten or fifteen years. It was horrible, a real jungle, he continues. And this building was in fact a real police station abandoned for years which had been squatted, damaged, broken. We wondered what we were going to do because there was still a lot of work to rehabilitate it but we ultimately broke everything inside and rebuilt everything to make a real/fake police station for the series. , concludes Sébastien Pavard.
