Shhh, “20 Minutes” went on the set of Faustine Bollaert’s show

“Come on, we have to go! This January afternoon, the producer of The secret box ensures that a very busy schedule is respected. In a studio in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, he presses a choir of children who have come to surprise one of the guests of the show. Masked, they repeat the song For you, Armenia three times, the time for everyone to understand how to hold the microphone properly. Before them, a singer with a “rocker’s heart” was doing his scales then another, for whom “the important thing is to love”, went to the set to get his hands on two songs, once. the polished and disinfected piano.

By then, it is already 4.30 p.m. but the day is far, far from over. The teams have been on the set since the morning and are preparing the recording scheduled to start at 7 p.m. The producer has been on the war footing for several hours, briefing the technicians, checking that nothing is missing, ensuring that everything is ready for the lives and playbacks. In short, it is on them and on him that all the pressure for the smooth running of the program rests.

Eight weeks of investigation before filming

Another essential cog in the machine, Faustine Bollaert is in her dressing room when the guests repeat their surprise. If the pressure begins to rise little by little, a large part of its missions have already been accomplished upstream. “I watch a lot of the interviews that the personalities have been able to give, as in Tea or coffee or The Unexpected Parenthesis. If we ask them a lot of questions on a topic, I try to find a different angle, ”she explains to 20 minutes.

Faustine Bollaert is not the only one to rummage through the archives of personalities. “There are journalists who spend their lives on the phone, going through all the books that artists have released, watching all the shows they have done,” lists producer Fanchon Giorda. In total, nearly eight weeks of investigation are necessary before the shooting, all this in order to involve a teacher, a choreographer, a singing coach, a teacher whom they particularly liked.

Of laughter and tears

The task has recently become complicated with the new version of the show which forces teams to work on group surprises. From time to time, the three small boxes that the personalities face open at the same time in order to lift the veil on one of their common points. “It could be their first job, a teenage poster… It creates a real bond between the three artists and real convivial moments,” notes Fanchon Giorda. A new mechanism whose goal is to play on the complicity between the guests and which is part of a program remodeling.

“During the first season, we were on a rope that was just emotion. Now we play with lots of strings, notes producer Jean-Philippe Lemonnier. It opens up lots of other possibilities that we didn’t have the year before because we were more focused on emotion. If the first numbers were therefore very tearful, the idea is now to go from laughter to tears while not forgetting to do some vocalizations.

“We try not to draw tears to them to draw tears, not to be in the pathos”, adds Faustine Bollaert. The facilitator does not especially feel like a midwife of buried emotions, in the same way that she could be in It starts today. “I feel more like the confidante of the personalities in The secret box, she says. I know everything, I pull the strings. It’s wonderful to be aware of every surprise. “

During the rehearsals of the mystery guests, the three personalities who will be in the spotlight the same evening, namely Michèle Bernier, Patrick Fiori and Carla Bruni during the program broadcast this Friday, May 7 on France 3, find themselves isolated in a building in front of the studio. If the three celebrities know that they will probably have tears in their eyes during the recording, they can always count on Faustine Bollaert and the blue box of tissues that sits to the left of her chair. There is no doubt that it will very likely empty over the surprises of the evening.