Best-selling author Leila Slimani and Fanny Herrero, the acclaimed writer of the French TV series Call My Agent, revealed in an interview on Tuesday that they have been collaborating on the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
Slimani, the Franco-Moroccan author of Lullaby, a book about a killer nanny, called it a "huge honour" to be asked to take part having arrived in France as an 18-year-old.
She promised "joy, emulation, movement, excitement and sparkle, and not only those famous philosophical values that France displays sometimes with a bit too much self-assurance."
Herrero, whose series about a Parisian talent agency has been one of France's biggest cultural exports of recent years, said she had been invited to develop a plot for the July 26 ceremony on the river Seine.
"My first reflex was that the job was too big and too beautiful for me. I was scared," Herrero told Le Monde of the invitation from Paris 2024 ceremony director Thomas Jolly.
"Then I said to myself that it was a unique adventure in life," she added.
The ceremony would celebrate France, its history and its attachment to universal human rights but "we wanted to avoid our natural tendency to lecture people," Herrero added.
The Paris Games are set to kick off with an unprecedented parade on the Seine that will see 6,000-7,000 athletes sail 6km (four miles) down the river on a flotilla of boats.
Historian and author Patrick Boucheron, another member of the creative team drafted in by Jolly, said the Paris ceremony would be nothing like the spectacular parade seen at the Beijing Olympics.
"The opening ceremony in Beijing in 2008 was exactly what we did not want to do: a history lesson addressed to the world from the host country, an ode to grandeur and a display of power," he told the newspaper.
The Paris event would "speak of the world to France and of France to the world" while being "the opposite of a virile, heroic story."
The list of entertainers for the ceremony remains a closely guarded secret but Jolly gave new hints about what to expect from the cast of roughly 3,000 dancers who are set to take part.
"We are not only going to use the banks of the river and bridges, but the sky as well. And the water," he said. "Who knows, there might be a submarine." - AFP
