A native of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, artistic director Dominique Desrochers is behind the sets of several Quebec series, including the dramatic comedy C’est comme ça que je t’aime, which bows out this year after three seasons successful. Dominique Desrochers also has nothing but praise for this project, which allowed her to return to her childhood and take on interesting challenges.
This series follows the tribulations of two seemingly ordinary neighboring couples who become involved in a fictional criminal cartel. The intrigues mainly take place in the Sainte-Foy district of Quebec City in the 1970s.
The fanciful side of the work immediately appealed to the sister of director Alain Desrochers, with whom she began her career on the sets of music videos.
“A series which is out of the ordinary and which is of the period is a real gift for any artistic director”, underlines the one who plunged, with her team, into the memories and photos of her adolescence to ensure that their work is as credible as possible.
The right team
Whether the project is set in the contemporary era or well before the 2000s, an artistic director has the same amount of time to prepare for filming, even if a period series requires more in-depth research in terms of furnishings and accessories.
This is why it is essential for Dominique Desrochers to select the right people for the right project, because one of his main tasks will be to supervise everything and deal with any emergencies occurring on filming locations.
“Selecting a team is my favorite part of my job. I like to find among my contacts the most competent people to meet the requirements of the scenario. So I don’t always have the same team from one project to another, but the fact remains that each time I need decorators, props designers before and after filming, upholsterers and painters,” she explains. who also attaches particular importance to harmony between his colleagues so that the work, although demanding and fast, is carried out with pleasure.
Functioning
Before she and a few collaborators spy on resale sites like Kijiji from top to bottom and tour flea markets and other second-hand stores, Dominique Desrochers must first carefully organize the six weeks she has before the actors come into play. scene.
The work of the native of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu does not end once the actors are in action, quite the contrary. It absolutely must be in symbiosis with the filming schedule, especially since the scenes are not shot chronologically, but according to location. In other words, all the scenes of the season that take place in a specific location, like a bar for example, are filmed in the same block.
“It’s a real Olympic sprint, especially for this particular project. We had to take care of around forty filming locations. Before shooting the first season, I did a lot of work upstream with the director Jean-François Rivard and the director of photography Barry Russell in order to know their vision and their main inspirations. We establish a color palette together,” explains the one who, once the palettes have been established, designs boxes with her ideas and waits for them to be approved.
For the first season, they opted for bold, burnt and contrasting colors with a dirty appearance. “The director didn’t want the setting to become a caricature of the 70s in the first season. During the second, we allowed ourselves to pour a little more into the clichés, because the character of Gaétan wants to redecorate everything in his house. So we had a blast with the tapestries which were out of the ordinary! » she says.
Pivotal places
The character of Serge Paquette, played by Patrice Robitaille, is the owner of a Sears-type big box store. Reconstructing such a place was not easy for Dominique Desrochers and his team, but they are more than satisfied with the result.
“We were able to film in a real abandoned Sears store, but due to budget, we had limited space. The store was empty. We had to find equipment to place the items as at the time and also the famous items that we sold in those years. As we had a very limited time to find hunting and fishing articles, jackets, scarves and jewelry from the period, a decorator was exclusively in charge of accessorizing the store,” explains the winner of two Gémeaux Prizes in the category best settings: fiction for the first two seasons of This is how I love you.
Serge Paquette’s above-ground swimming pool is also a central element of the series since it is the cradle of inappropriate actions committed by rivals from the Sainte-Foy underworld. If Serge Paquette maintains the pH of his water with exemplary attention to detail, the technicians also had to take care of it with great care.
“For the third season, the actors filmed the scenes taking place in the swimming pool at night, in June. The water was so cold. I was called to take care of a problem with a water heater that had simply stopped working. Smoke came out of the actors’ mouths while they were talking,” says with a slight smile the woman who would like to take on the artistic direction of a project taking place in a war context as her next challenge.
Diffusion
The complete series This is how I love you, in which the actors from Saint-Jean Olivier Gervais-Courchesne and Jean-François Provençal appear, is available in the EXTRA section of the TOU.TV digital platform. The third and final season will be broadcast later on ICI Radio-Canada Télé.
