GAUDREAULT A BUSY MAN
Montreal filmmaker Émile Gaudreault juggled new version of De père en flic with a sequel to the original
Émile Gaudreault has De père en flic on the mind. Big time.
The Montreal filmmaker came up with the original idea for De père en flic and co-wrote and directed the 2009 comedy. It grossed $10.5 million at the box office in Quebec, making it one of the biggest homegrown hits in the history of Québécois cinema.
Gaudreault has directed a madein-France remake, titled Père fils thérapie!, which opens in Montreal on Friday. He’s also directing De père en flic 2, which he shot here last summer. The sequel is set to be launched ici in July.
The original was a comic thriller about a father and son, both Montreal cops who hate each other and are less than thrilled when they end up working together. They are forced to go undercover and infiltrate a group of fathers and sons who are in therapy together — in the woods. In both the original and the sequel, the father is played by Michel Côté and the son by Louis-José Houde.
It must be strange juggling two De père en flic projects almost at the same time, I suggested to Gaudreault in an interview last month at the east-end studio where he was busy editing De père en flic 2.
“Well, firstly, we started working on the French version in 2012,” he said. “So that’s been a while. Then I got an idea for a sequel maybe two or three years later. Those projects were kind of parallel. Then the French movie was delayed because I lost an actor. So it was kind of a (matter of) circumstances that I shot them back-to-back like that. But I was editing the French version while writing De père en flic 2 and prepping it. So it was intense. But it was never confusing.”
At first it looked as if there would be an American remake of the film. The rights had been acquired in 2009 by Kathleen Kennedy, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, and Sony Pictures. They developed a couple of screenplays in English, “but they were not very good,” said Gaudreault.
The project was dormant at Sony, so when Kennedy became president of Lucasfilm and brand manager of the Star Wars franchise in the fall of 2012, she called Gaudreault and De père en flic producer Denise Robert and told them they should take back the rights to the Quebec film and try to do the remake elsewhere.
Around the same time, they heard from someone who wanted to produce a version of the film in France. Gaudreault and Robert thought that was a great idea, but they decided to stay involved. That’s how Gaudreault ended up directing and Robert producing this French-Canada co-production.
Gaudreault wanted to get the
remake right — in part because he has experience with remakes going wrong. He says the American writers simply didn’t get the concept of De père en flic, and his very first gig in the film biz here was co-writing the screenplay for the 1994 Quebec comedy Louis 19, which was remade as EDtv, a 1999 flop directed by Ron Howard.
So Gaudreault directed Père fils thérapie! and also wrote the screenplay, in collaboration with French writers Philippe de Chauveron and Guy Laurent, the duo behind the 2014 French comedy hit Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?
Père fils thérapie! stars Richard Berry as the older cop and standup comic-turned-actor Waly Dia as his son. The setting is moved from the woods of Quebec to the stunning Gorges du Verdon, a beautiful mountainous region in southeastern France. But the story is very similar.
“I wanted to keep what I thought was good in it,” said Gaudreault. “I wanted to keep the situations and the emotion of the story. I wanted to keep those scenes toward the end that were more dramatic. I wanted to keep the fact that it’s about the relationship between fathers and sons. That the comedy has its root in emotion. The rest was just improving on it.”
The cast of Père fils thérapie! also includes Jacques Gamblin, Baptiste Lorber, Julie Ferrier and Quebec comic Rachid Badouri.
While Gaudreault was immediately into the idea of a French remake, he resisted the proposal of a sequel for years. He finally gave in when he came up with what he thought was a great idea — that Houde’s character and his girlfriend would go into couples therapy to try to snare a criminal.
“It’s very similar and totally different,” said Gaudreault.
One change in the sequel is that Karine Vanasse replaces Caroline Dhavernas in the role of the girlfriend of Marc, Houde’s character. Dhavernas was not available for the shoot.
The cast of De père en flic 2 also features other newcomers to the series, including Patrice Robitaille, Julie Le Breton, Hélène Bourgeois-Leclerc, Sonia Vachon and standup comic Mariana Mazza.