Although Netflix’s new French drama Notre-Dame is based on real events, it tells the story of fictitious characters. Writer and director Hervé Hadmar tells us about the show’s creation.
The night Notre Dame Cathedral burnt back in 2019, Hervé Hadmar could not help but notice how all eyes were turned on the event. In France and across the globe, whether people were religious or not, all eyes watched the burning cathedral on the news, hoping it would remain standing.
This collective emotion is what drew Hadmar to create the new Netflix drama series Notre-Dame. Set during two days in 2019 when the fire took place, the show tells the story of men and women who all have a fire to put out.
Notre-Dame: A real event for a fictional story
“What the emotion we felt that night says is that unconsciously this burning cathedral is sort of a symbol of our society in crisis, which has its own fires to put out,” Hadmar explained. “And we have to accept losing a part of ourselves — it's the part of the fire that we need to leave behind– to better rebuild ourselves afterwards.”
Hadmar’s intent was therefore not to make a documentary about what happened at Notre Dame, but rather to use the event and the emotions connected to it to tell the story of various characters who have to face their own fire to better rebuild their lives.
For instance, there is Max, who desperately tries to find his daughter, Victoire, so she can say goodbye to her mother before she passes away. There is also Alice, a young firefighter who experienced a terrible loss on the job and wants to prove that she can overcome her trauma.
To tell their stories, Hadmar based the show around a real event and used a book, La Nuit De Notre-Dame, written by the Paris Fire Brigade and Romain Gubert. The book documents hour by hour what happened from the firefighters’ standpoint, technically and strategically, that night.
“We used that document and approached the Paris Fire Brigade to work with them and get their input on a lot of things,” Hadmar said. “Then I sorted things out because there were elements that were going against the vision I had for my characters so I voluntarily took some liberties.”
It's an ensemble show first
Notre-Dame is a choral story, with some of, but not all, the characters crossing paths. The common thread that unites them all is the blaze at the cathedral. To create these people, Hadmar worked with his co-writer Olivier Bocquet to make a list of characters they would like to explore.
“We came up with a list of around 20 characters, and from there we chose to keep six of them, including firefighters but not only,” Hadmar added. “And we chose to have complementary characters as well as characters having completely different experiences.”
In the end, a common thread among the characters is the notion of loss. Whether it is the loss of a mother, a child, a wife, or even the loss of innocence, all are echoed by the cathedral on fire, itself a tremendous cultural loss.
As Hadmar worked on the production design for the series, he kept in mind how he wanted to visually represent the idea that all the characters have an inner fire to extinguish. To him, that translated into using the color red throughout the visual language of the show.
“It’s not just the flames in the cathedral but also the use of red neons, for example in the scene where we see Victoire do drugs, she is bathed in this neon red light to symbolize her own fire,” Hadmar explained.
Hadmar directed all six episodes of Notre-Dame, something that is not always common on television. To him, this allows him to deliver a show that is not only coherent narratively but visually.
Pushing reality
While recreating the fire was a technical challenge supported by several visual effects companies, the series also had to rebuild parts of the cathedral in the studio. If some scenes crank up the dial of reality for dramatic purposes, Hadmar tried to stick to what really happened during the fire as much as possible.
“When it came to dramaturgically accentuate the emotion of the characters, they dictated to me what to do and when to divert from reality,” Hadmar said. “We're in a work of fiction, and it's not the fire of Notre Dame as you experienced it, it's a nightmare version of it.”
The show also received the support of the Paris Fire Brigade, who even helped train some of the actors portraying firefighters like Caroline Proust and Megan Northam. Although the series aims at representing the fire through a nightmarish lens, its production team did put a lot of work into recreating the blaze in all its catastrophic scope.
Some of the actors, like Northam, even had direct contact with flames during a scene where the blaze pursues her character and catches on her protective outfit. So for a show that is as much fiction as it is based on reality, things got pretty real on set.
All episodes of Notre-Dame are now available on Netflix.
