Failing to have been the launch of a great career as an actress, it was a first rewarding cinematographic experience. As a young journalist and having arrived in Paris only a few months ago, it was by chance from an announcement on a Facebook group that I learned that the shooting of a film would take place in Paris soon with Marilou Berry and that the production was looking for extras. It is actually the first film directed by Josiane Balasko’s daughter, which will be released in theaters in 2016. This sequel to Joséphine, a 2013 film, is an adaptation of the comic book series of the same name by Pénélope Bagieu.
It is at the end of the day on the very chic place François Ier, in the Champs-Élysées district in the 8th arrondissement of the capital, that the shooting of the second opus of the Joséphine saga will take place this famous June 12, 2015. For this second part entitled Joséphine rounds up, the heroine learns that she is pregnant and must therefore face all the new responsibilities that this implies. For this day of Parisian shooting, the extras are numerous and we spend long moments waiting between each take.
The production will install us in a small bar which I will understand later to be the place of the announcement of the pregnancy of the heroine, embodied by Marilou Berry, to her friends. Without having the slightest idea of the course of a shoot, I find myself seated with an actress who will play my sidekick for the evening for the rest of the shots shot that evening. It is the actor who plays the waiter who will take our order who will guide us. We are quickly explained that we are therefore customers among others and that we will therefore have to pretend to have a conversation and respond to the server by giving our fictitious drink choices as many times as the scene is reversed. Cyril Gueï and Sarah Suco are the two actors who play Josephine’s friends in this scene, played by Marilou Berry, who appeared very thin in this film. But we feel the actress very involved in each choice of sentence, frame. The actress is stressed because she is for the first time not only the main character of the film, but also the co-writer and director.
I will learn the hard way that the sound effects are added in post-production and that it is important not to speak or whisper, but to play Marceau mimes by moving your lips. For an inveterate talker like me, these long minutes of pretending to laugh and talking eye to eye with an unknown actress, with whom I will sympathize later, are very funny. The laughter is close on many occasions and each time we say action, we have to start again. Being an actor, even as an extra, is definitely a job.
It was in the middle of the night at 2:15 a.m. that the end of this day of filming ended my experience with my two friends for the day, both actresses. After long months of waiting, I will discover that I was cut during the editing in favor of another take with other extras, or that we only see the back of my extra colleague. In any case, no trace of my incredible charisma during the scene of discovering the pregnancy in the bar. Another budding actress will have taken advantage of my fleeting moment of glory. If you still want to watch the film Josephine rounds up, which Samantha Mazeras co-wrote with Marilou Berry, it will be rebroadcast on TF1 this Thursday August 4 at 9:10 p.m.