“It’s a film about human beings, not about sport,” says the director of the documentary on the Blues

Former major reporter and editorial director at The team for many years, director Benoît Pensivy followed four players from the France team (Giroud, Kimpembe, Hernandez and Lloris) for several months in order to deliver a unique portrait of world champions. Its goal, to tell the story of normal guys caught in an abnormal whirlwind, that of the world of football and its particular system which sometimes exceeds them.

We discover these players are a new aspect, with their flaws, their life stories not always rosy, as was the case for example for Lucas Hernandez, abandoned with his brother Theo and his mother by their father when they were still just kids. . With the journalist and presenter Ophélie Meunier, Benoît Pensivy thus manages to bring these star footballers back to “men’s height” in order to make them more accessible to the general public. The documentary entitled “Fathers, husbands and icons of football: the Blues with an open heart”, will be broadcast this Sunday in Zone Interdite on M6. For 20 minutes, the director agreed to tell us behind the scenes of the shoot.

Why did you choose this angle of attack and show the men behind the footballers?

As I have been working in the world of sport for almost 25 years, I know its cinematography and the universal values ​​that are conveyed there. I find that sport is a crossroads of many different worlds, which brings together people of all kinds, including athletes, who are basically people like everyone else, with fears, anxieties, joys, sorrows. Except that they are caught up in a system which is a dream, but also involves a lot of constraints and pressure.

What interests me is that people can relate to them and understand what they are going through. The idea was to make people feel the emotions and the essential things that they have in common. I think that with this film people will see the players in question in a totally different way. It humanizes footballers, it makes them more accessible.

Did you discover certain aspects of the life of these four players yourself while preparing this film?

Not really. But since these are four personalities, four origins and four stories, each has agreed to open up to different things. And we decided to position Hugo Lloris in a somewhat transversal role [le capitaine des Bleus est invité face caméra à commenter les films sur ses trois coéquipiers]. We found it interesting to make him react to the stories of the other three.

Regarding Lucas Hernandez, I think people will find out about his story. We realize that talent is often found in the cracks, whatever the field. There are a lot of them there because the dad is no longer there. On arrival, the two brothers broke through at the highest level, it is extremely rare. We also discover his visceral attachment to France, through the important place that his grandparents had in his life and that of Théo, since they were very often at home in Franche-Comté because the mother worked in Spain. And we understand why he chose to play for France and not for La Roja.

We discover that not all of them have had their destinies all laid out, that we had to drool over them to get to where they are …

Yes, the world is often hard on them. Even if they are not to be pitied because they earn a good living, because they are famous, because they do a good job, we do not realize what these people are going through and have to go through to get there. at the end of their passion. And that I think we managed to show it without falling into a tearful side. It’s not a light film, there is depth. There is in particular the aspect of the end of career that we discuss with Olivier Giroud.

They are not prepared for this. They live things to the fullest, they are surrounded by people who do not always have good advice, they have very short careers on the life ladder, and not all of them have understood that their next life is being prepared now. And finally, even if it is not commensurate with the average Beijing, everyone is a bit lost when it comes to retirement. Except that there everything is 100,000 times, the money, the pressure, the advantages, the problems, all in a very short time of life.

This is also why you chose to show people who share their lives, Lucas Hernandez’s mother, Giroud’s grandmother, wife and brother, etc. ?

Yes because we can clearly see to what extent the entourage can be a buffer between the life before, the life during and the life after, to what extent the education of each one, his origins, can allow him to go through this More or less good. We also understand how their performance is linked to what may be around. Afterwards, of course I have a benevolent gaze, but that doesn’t mean that we hide things and that we give a biased image of their life.

The part with the wife of Olivier Giroud, who returns to the criticisms suffered by her husband before Euro 2016, the comparison with Benzema, is very strong …

We shot the last sequence with Giroud after the announcement of the list so we have his reaction to Benzema’s return. You might think that it is just plain language, but in fact when you know his history and his upbringing, you realize that there is only sincerity in this boy. There is no secret in his success with the France team, if he managed each time to go beyond criticism, to become the second highest scorer in the history of the Blues, it is not. is not for nothing. He knows how to balance things between his ego and the best interests of the teams in which he plays.

Are the players’ entourage prepared for the criticisms that their loved ones may suffer?

Absolutely not. Lloris says it very well, you have to be prepared to live in a permanent emotional lift, between the success that is highlighted one day, sometimes very powerfully when there is a world champion title at the end, and the fact of to be denigrated the next day. And it’s not easy to manage that. They are more or less so, but their surroundings are not at all. They live by proxy the emotions of footballers and, in the case of criticisms against Giroud for example, we discover that his brother lived it very, very badly, much more than Olivier in fact.

Was it a bias not to shoot a lot of purely football sequences?

Yes, but there is also a choice to be credible on the purely football aspect when filming the Blues matches, but at the same time it is not a film about football. It is a film about the world of the players of the France team. This is also why we made particular choices of productions, we shot the France-Ukraine match with cinema cameras, there are slow motion on the players. We didn’t want to show images that people are used to seeing when they watch a game.

How did you feel about this group? We have the feeling on our side that there is a very strong bond that unites the Blues, that they really enjoy living together. Did you feel it too?

I couldn’t say because we shot this film during the Covid and we didn’t really have access to the group in its entirety. What I perceived, however, is that there is respect and intelligence. I remember a sentence from Aimé Jacquet in 98 in Eyes in the Blues which says “those who are on the ground must be bold and intelligent”. I think what we can understand behind this film is that it’s no secret that this team is performing well.