French writer and director Fanny Herrero is best known internationally as the showrunner behind Paris talent agency comedy-drama Call My Agent! , which was a hit in its original version and has since spawned a raft of remakes.
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She has recently added a new string to her bow as one of the co-writers of the much talked about Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony, which unfolded under torrential rain on the River Seine on Friday.
This credit will likely also boost her international footprint, or perhaps, her notoriety, given the wildly differing responses to the show, which embraced diversity and inclusion and brazenly explored history and tradition with an unapologetically contemporary take, at the same time as being the first Olympics opening to unfold on a river.
Speaking to Deadline prior to the ceremony, Herrero said the invite from artistic director Thomas Jolly to join the co-writing team came out of the blue.
“I guess the 2024 Paris committee must have done some brainstorming and on the script side my name up came up pretty rapidly because of the success of Call My Agent! ,” says Herrero.
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“My first reflex was to refuse. I felt like it would be too big and that I wasn’t the right person to do it. I guess that’s a natural human reaction, or perhaps a female one, to feel less legitimate than others. I thought about it for a long time, before finally saying I’d do it.”
The other members of the team were writer Leila Slimani, best known the best-selling novel ‘The Perfect Nanny’; celebrated historian Patrick Boucheron and director Damien Gabriac.
The decision to hold the opening ceremony on the River Seine had already been signed off on in 2021, with Jolly selected for the role of artistic director in 2022.
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Jolly’s initial sources of inspiration were Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine, and King Iphitos, who per legend, created the Olympic games in the ninth century BC in a bid to bring peace to then warring Ancient Greece.
But aside from that, the canvas was blank and the only instructions were to capture the French spirit. The co-writers started developing their ideas in the fall of 2022, with the main writing period running until the summer of 2023.
Their starting point was a boat trip up and down the six kilometer (4.5 mile) stretch of the River Seine, between the Pont d’Austerlitz and Pont d’Iéna bridges, earmarked for the ceremony.
“That day was seminal. We set off on the boat and quite simply looked at everything along the river… all the inspirational monuments, statues, buildings and places charged with history that have marked our cinema, literature, theatre, poetry and painting.”
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“We put everything we saw in the middle and then tried to draw out themes and references,” she continues.
“Everything came from this living backdrop. Being on a river which flows and is in perpetual movement brings something. It was a beautiful image for a portrait of country’s identity, which is constantly changing and being renewed.”
The team also studied past opening ceremonies and in particular that of Danny Boyle for the 2012 London Olympics.
“London was a big inspiration for its freedom, modernity and freshness, and the mixture of history and pop culture as well as the way it juxtaposed pomp and grandiosity with lightness,” says Herrero.
One of the highlights of working on the project, says the showrunner, was having the chance to collaborate with Slimani, Boucheron, Gabriac and Jolly.
“It was an extremely joyful and fertile experience,” she recounts. “One of the reasons I accepted this adventure was to be in the room with people I admire. I loved the time we spent together, seeing their brains work, listening to their references, their culture.”
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The process of working in a team of writers was second nature to Herrero, through her experience of writing TV shows.
“I’m used to writing rooms, and working with others to create a single work through collective intelligence,” says Herrero.
“That aspect didn’t worry me, I think the most unsettling thing for all of us was that none of us were completely in our element. We were all outside of our original disciplines. Trying to write an opening ceremony had nothing to do with what we’d done before.
“But that was great in a way because it put us all on an equal footing with a form of modesty and humility in relation to the scale of the task.”
The resulting work revolved around 12 tableaux unfolding at various points of the River Seine intertwining landmarks with different aspects of France, under the banners of “enchanted”, “synchronicity”, “liberty”, “equality”, “fraternity”, “sorority”, “sportivity”, “festivity”, “obscurity”, “solidarity”, “solemnity” and “eternity”.
The ambitious show, featuring some 3,000 dancers, acrobats and performers, was booked ended by Lady Gaga and Celine Dion and featuring a wealth of French talent in between, including top selling artist Aya Nakamura, singer-song writer Juliette Armanet, mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel and classical pianist Alexandre Kantorow.
Bad weather coupled with complex security, broadcasting and performance logistics meant was an endurance test for rain-sodden spectators on the banks of the river, and a wild ride for those at home, watching it on the small screen.
However, with time, single sections of the ceremony will likely become as iconic as parts of Danny Boyle’s 2012 London Olympics Show.
Aside from Celine Dion belting out Hymn to Love from the Eiffel Tower, standouts section included “liberty”, which shocked some for the appearance of a talking headless Marie Antoinette against the backdrop of a duo between rock band, Gojira and opera singer Marina Viotti; “synchronicity”, celebrating France’s rich artisan culture with an elaborate dance routine off the scaffolding of Notre Dame Cathedral; “equality” in which Nakamura performed her pop hits with the National Guard in front of the Academie Francaise, and “obscurity”, in which Armanet sang Imagine accompanied by a pianist sitting at a burning grand piano.
“It’s complicated capturing the spirit of France. Thomas would say it was like doing a puzzle. I preferred to think of France as a character with 12 sides to its personality, 12 ways of looking at it,” says Herrero.
“Our aim was to provoke different emotions, enthusiasm, energy, but also at times, something more solemn, more delicate, more subtle, alongside joyful and funny moments, and to try to also have some self-deprecation.”
Political events both globally and in France, which recently saw a left-wing coalition stop the rising far-right National Rally party from getting into government, also fed into the piece.
“We tried to approach these things, with both force and subtlety at a time when the extreme right, tension over identity and being scared of the other, is on the rise in a number of countries,” says Herrero.
“The Olympic Games is a time to try to offer something else, another discourse that is open, that is generous. We’re lucky in France to have a motto which is ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. We know that this is not necessarily always the reality, but we are proud of this motto, we wanted to celebrate and promote it, and even more so today.”
Herrero has been working on a number of other projects. Among them is a potential series for AppleTV+, which is still at the concept and discussion stage and has yet to be greenlit.
More concretely, she is in the process of finishing the screenplay for a feature film version of Call My Agent! , being produced Mediawan companies Mon Voisin Productions and Mother Production.
“I’ve nearly finished it, and it should shoot next year if everything goes to plan,” she says.
Herrero says it has been a joy transposing the reoccurring characters from the series to the big screen.
“I was over the moon to reconnect with them again. It was real pleasure,” she recounts. “I’d finish a piece of dialogue and then I’d rejoice in imagining each actor saying their lines. I know them all by heart so when I am writing I know their comedic and emotional notes. It’s been fun bringing them into new things, making them do things that they’ve never done before in the series.”
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