Honoured with the Woman in Series Award at the Series Mania Forum, which every year goes to a remarkable woman in the audio-visual industry and recognises her vision and leadership, Isabelle Degeorges, who directs Gaumont Télévision France since 2013 and has to her credit some international successes such as Lupin and Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, has talked in Lille with journalist Marta Bałaga, a great opportunity to take a look behind the scenes of the making of series and to benefit from her enlightened perspective on the evolution and the conjecture of the industry.

Asked what she liked most about her job as a producer, Degeorges underlined a multi-faceted aspect which can rarely be found in other professions: “at Gaumont, we tell very different stories and it’s fascinating to create a new universe each time, especially since it requires teamwork since we are dealing with artistic talent, technicians, broadcasters, and with the ambition to create high-end series, and therefore at a very important budget level.” A diversity that is also part of the open and flexible approach necessary to each project, which the producer illustrated by highlighting two very different projects. “For Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, it was important to have a character that the audience could love because the real Karl Lagerfeld was inscrutable, as if behind a mask. We therefore took inspiration from his humanity as highlighted by Raphaëlle Bacqué in his book Kaiser Karl and we therefore recreated the character. It also took us a long time to decide on the time period for the story before settling on the 1970s, when he was no one and was simply trying to become somebody. [...] For Lupin, it was different because we wanted it to be a funny series and because we had decided to work with an English screenwriter for the show to be universal. This taught me a lesson because many scenes he’d write would be very funny, but for my Cartesian mind, they didn’t work, they were not credible, such as Lupin’s escape in the second episode of the first season. But George Kay, the screenwriter, told me: “who cares, it’s entertaining, this is what we’re looking for”. In France, when we write a series, we want everything to make sense and we are sometimes boring because it isn’t entertaining [...]. In my line of work, you have to know how to listen. Sometimes, it’s obvious the other person is right, but other times, that isn’t the case. It isn’t always easy to know what is the right direction to take in order to be aligned with what we want to tell. That’s why it is teamwork, because you need to discuss and decide together. It isn’t always easy and sometimes, the producer has final say, or the director, or the screenwriter, or the broadcaster. And eventually, there is conflict.”

Asked about her vision of the evolution of the series industry in France Degeorges gave a sharp analysis: “I’ve been working in this industry for 25 years, but the first ten years, it wasn’t as demanding as it is now. Back then, we were only working for the French market and we all had a lot to learn, whether in production, direction, screenwriting. For about ten years, the environment has become very global and we have progressed a lot, but now we face, as in every other country, another challenge: there is less money than five years ago. We must therefore find solutions, in the writing and in our way of working, to create ambitious series with smaller financing. At the same time, everything is more expensive, so it’s very complex.”

Regarding her current projects, the producer mentioned The Deal [+leggi anche:
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scheda series], in competition at Series Mania this year: “it is one of our missions to tell stories that resonate with the world we’re living in. This is a series about the negotiations between the USA and Iran in 2015 regarding nuclear power, a political thriller. Characters of different nationalities are stuck in a hotel and must find a solution. One of the main ingredients is that all the characters are very strong and we understand very well each of their motivations. This show is carried more by them than by the plot: it is them who hold the spectator’s attention beyond the resolution of the ongoing negotiations. As a producer, I think it’s important to have fun series and others that make you cry, but we must also explain our world and this series resonates very much with everything going on today.”

“I am also currently producing an auteur series for Apple TV+: L’ombre des forêts by Cédric Anger, who is a filmmaker and has written the script. Benoît Magimel and Mélanie Laurent star. It’s a series about paranoïa, with a group of four friends who go hunting in the woods. They get shot at, one of them shoots back and kills someone. What to do next? They are human, they make a bad decision and their life will become a nightmare. For me, what’s interesting is to be with them and to wonder what we would have done in their place. It’s very hard to project oneself into such a situation, that we’ve never experienced, but it is fascinating to feel their emotions and fears. And it is very different to work with an auteur like Cédric Anger because this is his story and not one of our ideas, that of a screenwriter or a book adaptation: he knows exactly what he wants. And since he comes from cinema, we know his films, so we know what he likes to do and what kind of series this will be, and we must respect that, otherwise we wouldn’t be working with him.”