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Neubauer Artists LLC
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A pioneer of the showrunner role in France and creator of ‘Call My Agent!’, Fanny Herrero is celebrating twenty years of a career forged from audacity, self-assured doubts, and passion. Recently invited to the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF), she reveals the secrets of a career that places great emphasis on teamwork.
Nothing predestined Fanny Herrero to reign supreme in screenwriting and captivate a global audience. The daughter of renowned Toulon rugby player and coach Daniel Herrero, and herself a high-level volleyball player, she was raised far removed from the artistic world. “I grew up in an environment that wasn’t at all connected to culture, much less the world of cinema. Screenwriter? That didn’t exist. None of those professions existed,” she explained on the November 6th episode of Vertigo. A Sciences Po graduate, with a promising career path seemingly laid out for her, she nevertheless decided to follow her passions and took a year off to try her hand at theater.
This interlude turned into six years on the Parisian stage acting in “mediocre productions”. “I was actually an average actress, but it led me to writing. In fact, that’s what I was looking for, but I had to do it to discover it.”
The art of dressing up applied to writing
In 2007, she co-founded a screenwriting collective and worked for fifteen years on series such as ‘Un village français’, ‘Kaboul Kitchen’, and ‘Fais pas ci, fais pas ça’. Then Fanny Herrero made her mark by creating one of the most acclaimed comedies on French television: ‘Dix pour cent’ (Call My Agent!). A project born from an unexpected call from her agent and championed single-handedly, from the casting of Camille Cottin to negotiations with Cécile de France for the first episode, and then the biggest names in world cinema who followed over the course of the series’ seasons.
For her, screenwriting has never been a solitary exercise. Influenced by her sporting roots as a high-level volleyball player, she sees the screenwriting workshop as a team sport. “What we have in common is collective intelligence. We put people in the same room who are both compatible and very different. And we have to make sure that everyone can flourish and contribute their best to something bigger than themselves, which is the creation we’re all going to make together. So there’s a matter of ego and solidarity, of sharing and, sometimes, a little flash of personal genius.”
In France, Fanny Herrero helped establish the role of showrunner, a still relatively unknown profession. “On a series, there are several screenwriters. For ‘Call My Agent!’, for example, I led the writing, but I had between four and five writers working with me each season. Then, since there are several episodes to write and produce, there are several directors who take turns. Some direct two or three episodes per season.” She added: “And since so many people are involved in the production and writing, and then the directing, you need someone who has the overall vision and who ensures the series’ coherence. That’s what a showrunner is: someone who comes from a writing background, but who is then able to collaborate with all the different departments, from the beginning to the final delivery of the series.”
Knowing how to listen to your limits in order to be reborn stronger
Fanny Herrero’s career path is also a lesson in professional clarity and work-life balance. “Having a series renewed, knowing that you’ll be able to develop your work over several seasons and work with actors over the long term, it’s an extraordinary experience, an immense opportunity. And at the same time, it’s a demanding job, because, as I was in charge of the writing, I never had a break. The writing process is quite long; it takes about a year to write one season. And when filming started, I had to divide my time between going on set and already starting to write the next season, and so on,” she explains.
After three seasons of a seven-year marathon, seeing creative drought creeping in, she dared to do what few writers at the top do: hand over the reins for season 4. She then conceived a new project, the series ‘Drôle’, and experienced the inherent uncertainties of creation: ‘Drôle’ only lasted one season on Netflix. “These are very unpredictable professions; you’re both privileged when things go well, which is the case for me, for example, and precarious, because you never know what tomorrow will bring,” she reflects.
Reunion, transmission and commitment
It was this appetite for renewal that allowed the feature film ‘Call My Agent!’ to emerge, released in September on Netflix. More than just an opportunistic sequel, the film’s script required a reinvention of the narrative grammar. Where the series operated in a “star-shaped” fashion to follow the evolution of multiple characters, the film demanded a tightly focused “centrifuge” centered on the struggle of Andrea (Camille Cottin) as she directed her first film.
A way for Fanny Herrero to rehabilitate the work of the teams behind the scenes, often made invisible: “I wanted to put back at the center what it is to make a film, this collective adventure, to show that it has meaning, that it is not just a small group of people who are navel-gazing, but that it is also intermittent workers, precarious people who get their hands dirty and their feet in the mud, literally.”
Interview by Anne Laure Gannac
