The tricky business of making a series about the restaurant industry
The Quebecois series Casse-Gueule, funded by the Canada Media Fund, premieres on Crave February 12th. An ode to local gastronomy, every stage of production required a colossal amount of work. Here, star Émile Schneider, head consultant Antonin Mousseau-Rivard and producer Hugo d’Astous revisit the challenges of a shoot in which food became a main character.
Casse-Gueule’s opening scene sets the tone for the series. In the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant, head chef Clovis (Émile Schneider) is working with his team. Amidst a symphony of pots and pans, he tastes a sauce, finishes a plate with tweezers, and checks on the leeks fondant. The images parade across the screen at a lively clip, mixing close-ups of food with wide shots of the excitement happening behind the ovens. But sooner or later, catastrophe strikes…
Written by Frédéric Ouellet and Daniel Chiasson, the eight-episode dramedy follows the adventures of Clovis, a party boy in his 30s who opens his own restaurant with two friends (Zouheir Zerhouni and Mylène Mackay) after being fired from the establishment where he trained. Between financial difficulties, tensions in the kitchen, and the return of his daughter (Estelle Fournier) to his life, Clovis has to learn to be a leader.
“Few series on the restaurant industry exist because producing them is extremely demanding and expensive,” says producer Hugo d’Astous, president of Duo Productions. “We had to be resourceful, work hard and prepare meticulously.”
Getting His Hands Dirty
To learn to cook like a real chef, Schneider was coached by Antonin Mousseau-Rivard at Montreal’s famous restaurant Le Mousso.
Similar to the method taught at The Actors Studio, where performers mine their experiences to prepare for a role, Schneider was trained in all aspects of working in a kitchen, from washing dishes to preparing sauces to developing knife skills. (And yes, it took less than a minute for him to injure himself cutting onions.)
“Knowing how to cook for your family, that’s one thing. Knowing how to cook like a real chef, that’s another. On screen, credibility is essential, there are plenty of details you can’t mess up,” says Mousseau-Rivard.
Once he’d mastered the culinary techniques, Schneider could concentrate on delivering his lines for director Mathieu Cyr’s cameras. “My goal, above all else, was to not waste the team’s time because I wasn’t able to get the movements right,” says the 36-year-old actor who’s tacking his first big TV role. “It seems trivial, but just placing a pat of butter in a hot pan and cooking a fish while I say a line can be complicated.”
Designing the Dishes
As usual with a TV series, each scene required several takes. To ensure consistency, the dishes had to look exactly the same from one shot to the next — the same arrangement of ingredients on the plate, the same texture, the same colour.
With the help of culinary stylists and prop masters — who all had restaurant industry experience — Mousseau-Rivard created multiple copies of the same dish, sometimes on extremely short deadlines.
“The whole team had to cooperate to create each moment,” recalls D’Astous. “When the actors were gobbling up the food, the dishes had to be steaming, when they cut a leg of lamb, the jus had to run out. I can’t even begin to count how many legs of lamb we needed.”
For complex shots, the team would cheat a bit by choreographing movements in advance. “We rehearsed with dry pans,” Schneider says. “The camera moved around us, filming our hands and our faces. Then, everything was adjusted in editing as needed.”
Searching for Ingredients
To make things more challenging, the team wanted to showcase local, fresh and authentic ingredients. “We needed impeccable food because we wanted to celebrate Quebec’s local cuisine and artisans,” says d’Astous. “That all translated into dollars, but most importantly into on-screen value, by generating emotion.”
Every day, Mousseau-Rivard had to find the ingredients, including some that were out of season, for the recipes in the script. “The team was lucky to have me,” he exclaims. “In Montreal, if anyone can find fresh sea urchin, it’s me and the gang at Au Pied de Cochon [restaurant]. We’re the only ones who get them delivered directly by fishermen from the Côte-Nord.”
And when ingredients were impossible to source, he had to get creative. “In one scene, Clovis has to cook bear for a private party,” says the chef. “But it’s illegal to buy wild game meat from a hunter, you can be fined. So, we had to use a legally available alternative — seal, whose extremely dark colour and metallic flavour is similar to bear.”
A Winning Recipe
But is there a danger that food so spectacular could overshadow the actors?
For d’Astous, everything had to be balanced. “We certainly didn’t want the scenes to feel like advertisements or cooking shows,” he says. “We had to find the middle ground between gorgeous visuals, action, settings and emotion. Those are elements the audience won’t consciously notice, but they will most definitely feel.”
Schneider thinks viewers will also recognize themselves in the characters and the issues they face.
“Casse-Gueule is also about friendship, rekindling a father-daughter relationship, and ambition,” he says. “By opening his own restaurant, for the first time in his life, Clovis dares to give himself something grand and magical. But to do it, he needs to clean up his past and face his own demons.”
And, in contrast to the American TV series The Bear, Casse-Gueule explores positive human relationships through a chef who is more respectful of his team, Mousseau-Rivard says. “I think a wide audience will find what they’re looking for in this show.”
