By freely adapting Fabien Feissli’s novel “In Saltwater” published in 2015 into a four-episode mini-series, this ambitious project renamed “On the High Seas” combined all the uncertainties. This was without counting on the talent of Denis Rabaglia and his teams to avoid a possible shipwreck.
It seems a long time ago when RTS was content to co-produce cozy series taking place in vineyards or libraries. Today, the fiction department is thinking big, thinking wide and even wide! You had to be a little crazy to launch the construction of a psychological thriller almost behind closed doors, filmed on board a real cargo ship, set in the Swiss merchant navy and based on an international cast whose only face was almost well-known to the general public would be Maud Wyler.
The mini-series “On the High Seas” features inspector Aurélie (Maud Wyler) who awkwardly lets Florian (Maël Cordier), a young man suspected of being involved in the disappearance of his girlfriend Julia (Isaline Prévost) slip away. Radeff). Aurélie learns that he was arrested on a Swiss merchant marine freighter for the murder of a sailor. Sent to South Africa to repatriate him, she discovers that Julia had been a passenger on this cargo ship a few weeks earlier. She continues her investigation, alone, and faces resistance from the crew. Little by little, tension builds, with Julia’s ghost hovering over the freighter.
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A merchant ship as a setting
As you will have understood, this is a merchant ship which serves as a unique and impressive setting. “We said to ourselves that we needed a boat and that we couldn’t just do everything with green screens,” director Denis Rabaglia said in the 7:30 p.m. of November 21. The option indeed seems non-negotiable to obtain the expected realistic result. Anyone who has ever observed a cargo ship at the dock readily imagines, behind the gigantism of the building, the labyrinth hidden inside and conducive to fabulous images.
The engine room with its tangle of stairs, its pipes on three floors, its immense rusty, almost empty hold which can be used as a basketball court, its cockpit and its bridges offer grandiose natural settings essential to a crime thriller. tense atmosphere where danger lurks everywhere.
By chartering a bulk carrier – a cargo ship – 160 meters long, production thought it had solved the major problem. Except no! If a shoot is imperatively based on a precise work plan established months in advance to avoid any budget overrun, with the merchant navy, it is quite different. Impossible to book a cargo ship nine months in advance. And when a company accepts, it is unable to guarantee that it will be available on the said day. The Interlaken of the series will nevertheless dock the day before the first day of filming in Bilbao.
Filming under constraints
The weather, another source of anxiety, will prove favorable, an essential asset because the boat cannot go out in all weathers. The days at sea represented a real challenge imposed by the harbor master’s schedules which were not compatible with those of the filming. It was better to secure everything upstream to save time at sea. For example, to give the illusion of the open sea during a reverse shot, a major maneuver requires the cargo ship to be rotated 180 degrees, which is not possible. in seconds.
Filming on a bulk carrier at sea requires above all compliance with safety instructions with which it is impossible to compromise, hence the use of a small team subject to essential efficiency. And because Denis Rabaglia wanted a multicultural crew on screen which symbolized the social scale, non-French-speaking actors were retained, which did not always facilitate the accuracy of their performance in French. In the end, five years to develop such a series in the form of a psychological thriller will not have been too long for an impressive result to be discovered on Play RTS.
Philippe Congiusti/ld
“On the High Seas” by Denis Rabaglia, with Maud Wyler, Carlos Bardem, Philippe Torreton, Mael Cordier. To see on Play RTS in full from November 21, 2024 until May 20, 2025.
