Fanny Herrero: “Finding the Ten Percent gang excited me a lot”

The showrunner of the first three seasons is back for Ten Percent, the Movie. Why had she left? Why did she come back? And how did she construct this feature film? She tells us everything.

She takes her Ten Percent back.

Fanny Herrero was at the start of the adventure, creating then writing the France Télévisions series for three seasons, before leaving the ship.

But she is back at the helm of the Netflix film, which will be a hit around the world in mid-September. In the new issue of Première currently on newsstands, with Ten percent on the cover, the showrunner says she succumbed to a “form of burn-out” after the first three seasons.

“I worked on this series for seven years non-stop. I had reached saturation despite immense joys and moments of pride.”

Above all, a lack of recognition finally convinced her that it was time to put the pen down: “Some of my producers had difficulty with the notion of showrunner. They always left me free, but without ever completely recognizing to what extent it was useful to secure and promote this position. This could have created friction with certain directors. So after a while, I said: If you don’t want to recognize my place, my importance and my work, manage without me!”

How Fanny Herrero came back to write the film Ten Percent

Having left on Netflix with Funny, acclaimed by critics, Fanny Herrero finally dives back into the world of Ten percent for this feature film, five years later. It was to her that the production entrusted the writing.

“It all started with the International Emmy Award that the series won in 2021. Very elegantly, the producers invited me to New York. They had experienced a very difficult season 4 to bring to fruition and I think they understood that it was important to have an author who mastered everything from A to Z. The people who succeeded me were great, but it was obviously complicated to arrive on a series after three seasons. It was in New York that the producers invited me offered to come back.”

The author didn’t take long to accept, “because this time it was a film. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but writing Ten Percent remains my greatest pleasure. And the time that has passed has allowed me to digest a lot of things and have nostalgia for this strip. I wanted to rewrite for them.”

Why the film will take a time jump

And in particular to find Camille Cottin and Laure Calamy, with whom she remained close: “Finding artistic complicity with them excited me a lot (…) They are a bit like Gérard Depardieu and Pierre Richard in the feminine. Andréa is quite arrogant, scathing and snobbish. And Noémie, constantly in search of recognition.”

For this Netflix version, Fanny Herrero also wanted to respect the real time of the series: “The ASK agency closed in 2020 at the end of the fourth season. We therefore pick up the characters five years later. From there, we asked ourselves two additional questions: what happened to them and how to bring them together?”

For this, the author returned to the DNA of Ten percent: the cinema ecosystem: “Andréa could not have become a real estate agent. We made her a director because, of the whole gang, it was her character who had the panache and the artistic fiber. From there, she had to surround herself. But it was also essential that the film was loaded with strong contemporary themes.” However, there is no question of transforming the film into an inventory of the French industry: “It was also not a question of taking an inventory of French cinema: the platforms, the CNC, Bolloré… This film is innervated by lots of contemporary anxieties which go beyond the framework of our small environment.”

How George Clooney got cast in the film Ten Percent

And like the DNA of Ten Percent, these are obviously the guests. The film therefore perpetuates the tradition by welcoming Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne, Laurent Lafitte in their own roles, but also George Clooney. The screenwriter tells us how they managed to bring him in:

“We knew from Camille that Clooney loved the series. We contacted him thanks to Pierre-Antoine Capton, the boss of Mediawan. He immediately said yes… but wasn’t convinced by our first idea. It didn’t make him laugh; we were on the wrong track…” The first scenario focused in particular on a physical comedy that didn’t really correspond to the actor’s humor. “Luckily, he’s latched on to a new idea where he pretends he can hear all the criticism when in fact he’s super touchy. He got his hands dirty, co-writing with us…”

The film Ten percent will be screened in exceptional preview at the Angoulême Festival this Saturday, before being put online on Netflix on September 10.