Because in cinema there's one thing to remember, which is the following saying:
Who deals with the sea, deals with s**t. That will be difficult to translate in English.
But it's true that all the films made at sea are always very complicated.
So I was telling the story of "Fishermen Island" the other day, where everyone was sick and we were
forced to make another trip. And there, we redid it with Schoen,
because he really likes it when there's a storm and it... [Q] 'Drummer-Crab'.
We did Drummer-Crab. So for Drummer-Crab, we were lucky to... So the Navy was up for it
because they have a place of honour in it.
We were lucky to have... And it's another film with Jacques Perrin... To have a boat which was
the Jaureguiberry which was a squadron escort ship, which was quick, meaning that it was
part of the boats that dated back to just after the war, which were boats that could go at 40 knots,
I don't remember how fast, an absolutely incredible speed. So there was a steel hull,
the deck houses were in aluminium, that's in fact the reason why it destroyed itself
because those two metals with sea water, it was like an electric battery, they reacted to each other.
So we were on that boat and it was its last mission.
Meaning that afterwards, it was used as a target for exocet shootings.
So when we have... So it was planned, we had decided when to shoot,
we didn't choose the time when the sea had an 80% chance of being slack, we chose the time when
there was a 90% chance of the sea being at least a force 5.
And there were still quite a lot of things to do.
So we did something a little similar to what we were saying about storyboards,
meaning that Pierre and I filmed all the shots that needed to be done on the boat, we looked at
the locations of all the shots and we got wind cones of Elemac bazookas welded on the deck,
in order to be able to fix the cameras so that we didn't have to worry about using stands.
Meaning that each shot had its location, so... And that in each camera's spot,
a small wind cone had been welded. And since the boat was going to be sent for scrap,
it enabled us to weld things on the deck, because if it had been a serving boat we
wouldn't have been able to weld anything.
[Q] Of course. And also for the lighting, like on all boats,
the ceilings are very low, so to fix the equipment all we needed to
was drill holes and then screw them to the boat's sheet-metal ceiling. So that, that was...
It was an epic because we were living on the boat.
we were in... So they had taken off the boat,
the guys from the torpedo boats and things like that,
to make room for us in one of the holds, it's called a post.
And that's where the entire film crew was lodged, so there must have been 15 of us sleeping like sailors.
And there were also three or four sailors that slept in that post.
So, that's when it really needs to be a love story, because we were almost sleeping in the same bed.
And in addition in bad conditions, because we were shaking all the time, there's a terrible
racket because of the sea hitting the hull,
and we weren't far from the sonar, we heard the constant racket of the menar when it was probing.
It was an extraordinary epic.