Camille de Castelnau was one of the main scriptwriters of a recent classic such as the French spy series infiltrator office. Hand in hand with the creator of the fiction, Eric Rochant, he was in charge of writing most of the chapters and thus giving it his particular identity. While enjoying that professional triumph, his family faced a tragedy: the leukemia of his niece, the daughter of his sister, while she was still a child. When his mentor Rochant proposed that he take a step further in his career and create his own series, he devised a family chronicle in eight chapters that, without being exactly autobiographical, shows a situation similar to his own: Rose, the girl of the fictional clan, 9 years old, suffers from a serious illness. How each of its members face it and how they deal with the different emotional consequences of this process triggers the subplots of Everything is going wellnow available in the Disney+ catalog.
“Talking about this matter was not my initial idea. But no matter how much I thought about a topic to talk about, the only thing that came up in my head was that situation that my family was going through. And for my first series as the sole director I wanted to tell something realistic. That does not mean that the story has to be a pure tragedy (nor, of course, a pure comedy),” defended the creator in mid-January in Paris, at a meeting with the international press to present the project.
De Castelnau found it easy to avoid melodrama. “As a viewer, I can enjoy it, but it often bores me. She was part of that minority in France that does not like Pedro Almodóvar’s films. I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s too fanciful for my taste (like Quentin Tarantino). It’s too technical; Too aesthetic… It takes me out of the story and emotionally disconnects me from the characters. As a director and writer, I am not capable of doing a genre like that. I just believe that life is not melodramatic. Even in the darkest moments there is humor, except perhaps in situations like a war,” she argues.
The Frenchwoman gives a very specific example in this regard about a personal situation she experienced during her niece’s illness: “One day, my sister received a message of condolence from a distant relative, who mistakenly believed that the girl had already died. My sister tried to respond as politely as possible to something so uncomfortable: thank you for your message, but no, it hasn’t happened yet… It was terrible, but we also found it fun,” she recalls. In the eight chapters of the series, the tone of the story moves between darkness and lightness. “The characters seek relief from this situation, although it may shock us, it is a human reaction. On a plane they always recommend that in case of emergency you put on your own mask before your own children’s. And that’s what happens to the adults in this family. “If they don’t survive the situation, they can’t help their children.”
Despite navigating the delicate situation of showing some of the intimacies of those close to her, De Castelnau assures that it was not difficult to ask permission from her sister and her niece – who responded to the treatment and is now 15 years old – to make a series about your experience. “I asked them because I had nothing to lose if they said no, because I had not started developing a script. It turns out that they were excited about the idea. My sister is an advisor for the series, because there are many situations that a mother experiences in this context that you cannot invent for a script if you have not experienced it firsthand. And much less can you explain it to an actress. She also makes a cameo in one of the chapters,” she comments.
The now director decided that not all the female characters in Everything is going well They were heroines. Not that all mothers were perfect. In this series there are all types, mothers of adult women (who are also grandmothers), mothers of children and mothers of other people’s children (stepmothers). “Women are not always right. Being a woman is not synonymous with being a good person, or a victim… It is much more complex than all that,” says the Frenchwoman, who created the series before Disney+ entered the production process. The only suggestion that those responsible for the platform asked her after reading the pilot chapter was that she work more on the male characters, because they were quite blurred. “And they were right. We made up for it by adding a couple more sequences starring the men in the family in that episode,” she recalls.
One of those male characters is played by Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega, who has worked on almost a dozen projects in France since participating in the film. Novo (2003), with Anna Mouglalis, and in other titles such as Beauty and the Beast (2014), together with Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel. In 2024, she co-stars with Monica Bellucci in Marjane Satrapi’s new drama, Paris Paradise. He is the partner of the character played by Virginie Efira, the sick girl’s aunt. “We saw a lot of actors for the role. But precisely the fact that he spoke French with an accent gave him points, because he is a member of the family who comes from outside, who already has his own daughter with an ex-partner. Furthermore, Eduardo conveys the calm that he needed to counteract the energy of Virginie’s character, who spends the entire series stressed to the point of hysteria.”
In a story like that of Everything is going well It is very important to find the right actors, defends De Castelnau. “This is the story of a family and, if one of them is not credible, it breaks the balance and puts the viewer back. And precisely the most crucial thing is that the child actors, who are the ones with the least experience, do it well. If their performances fail, the series falls apart,” he admits.