Acclaimed French-Moroccan author Leïla Slimani details her role in this evening’s historic opening ceremony Photo: Getty There are just hours to go until the highly anticipated Paris Olympics 2024 opening ceremony kicks off, and Leïla Slimani is feeling impatient. At least that was the case yesterday, when the French-Moroccan author spoke with Vogue Arabia over the phone from Spain. The acclaimed creative , who was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her hair-raising, killer-nanny novel Chanson douce in 2016, was tapped to co-write spectacle alongside historian Patrick Boucheron and television screenwriter Fanny Herrero (of Dix pour cent fame).
The trio collaborated for nearly a year during a process that included Zoom brainstorms, midnight phone calls, and trips to Paris for secret meetings along the Seine, where the colossal event will take place. Slimani is also nervous — about the rain, about something going wrong. After all, more than 100 heads of state and government will be in attendance and 300,000 spectators are expected to line the river.
The floating procession will see around 100 boats carrying an estimated 10,5000 athletes for six kilometers, passing landmarks such as Notre Dame and the Louvre. “I am not in Paris, I am going to be watching from afar,” she shares. “In any event, I don’t like crowds, so I don’t want to watch it there.
I’ll see it on television.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Olympic Games (@olympics) More than anything, though, Slimani is excited “like a child before Christmas,” she quips. She can sense the excitement of others building too as the event draws near.
For months, the Seine has been a global focal point of conversations about the Olympics: how dirty it is , whether or not the mayor would swim in it ( she did ), if a submarine would emerge from its waters during the ceremony. Now that it has been confirmed that Celine Dion and Lady Gaga will be performing Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” for the occasion, the cyber chatter has reached fever pitch, and people around the world are eager to discover what other surprises await. While Slimani couldn’t disclose too much, she detailed the overarching principle that she, Boucheron, and Herrero often referred back to while developing the show’s concept with artistic director Thomas Jolly.
“The philosophy of the Olympics is that we’re not defined by our nationality or by the color of our skin or by this or that, but by the fact that we are human beings sharing a place, living on the same earth at the same time,” she says. “It’s very difficult to build the ceremony with this idea because it could seem very naïve and quite childish, but it’s also very beautiful to have this ideal. So we tried, without being naïve, to be able to build something [around this notion of] universality.
” The high-profile event comes amidst a turbulent and shifting political landscape in the country. In a snap election held earlier this summer, the French far right’s rise to a position of unprecedented force was ultimately thwarted by a left-wing coalition. When Franco-Malian R&B singer Aya Nakamura — the most-streamed French-speaking artist online — faced a wave of racist abuse from conservatives as rumors about her involvement in the opening ceremony began to circulate, it became clear just how much power the show has to make a statement.
And, according to Slimani, it would be impossible not to. “We knew at the very beginning of the writing of the ceremony that it was also a question of soft power — that what we were going to express, the way that we were going to describe French identity, to describe France, was going to have a political impact,” she says. Below, the author gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how it all came together.
This is the first time an Olympics opening ceremony will take place outside of an arena, and on a river no less. People can’t wait to see how it will unfold. What they are going to see is absolutely unique and I’m very, very proud of this not only because I worked [on it] but because I’m very proud for the French people, for the Francophone community, and for what we are going to offer to humanity because so many people are going to watch this show at the same time, at the same moment.
Over a billion of them, according to the official website of the 2024 Paris Olympics! How did you and your co-writers approach storytelling at this immense scale? We decided to really have a vision to share with the public. We wanted it to be as inclusive, as open, as diverse as possible, to see different bodies, different colors, different visions of France. The clichés but also what is behind the clichés; the values of France but also how those values were sometimes manipulated.
So we tried to have a very complex and nuanced but also joyful and colorful ceremony. Your work isn’t exactly known for being joyful. Was it difficult for you to make that tone shift? The big difference was that I was not alone.
Maybe when I am alone I write more about introspection and about darkness, about my own nightmares, but when you are with other people and you write with them and you are influenced also by this enthusiasm and this idea of giving something big to the people, you are in a very different state of mind. I was very honored and very happy to have been chosen for this. It’s an honor, of course, and a tremendous responsibility.
At the beginning I tried not to think about the pressure, about how big it was. I was just like a very happy child who has been chosen to organize a big party with my friends, and I tried just to think like this because I didn’t want to be [crushed] by the pressure. I wanted to feel free, I wanted to imagine things as wild and as big as possible, and I think it was the same as my other friends.
Your friends being your co-writers, Patrick Boucheron and Fanny Herrero. Were the three of you always on the same page? From the beginning we were all aligned about the atmosphere we wanted to create. And when I said joyful [before], it doesn’t mean that there will not also be some darkness.
You will see some darkness, some anxiety, and it will not be naïve. It’s not just about joy and colors and the French cancan and all of that. There will also be some darkness because we see the world we are living in and we know how difficult the times are.
Which part are you most looking forward to? I’m very excited about how we are going to represent femininity, sorority, women, and how important women were in French history. I’m very, very proud and excited about that, and I’m sure you are going to love this part of the ceremony. It’s a very feminine ceremony.
As the only Arab voice on this three-person writing team, did you feel pressure to speak out about the controversies surrounding the rights of marginalized groups participating in the competition, an example being the ban on French female athletes wearing the hijab? Yes, of course. Not pressure, but during the [whole] process I tried to be the one who addressed these questions and who always tried to make my friends remember that. When we were writing scenes very often I would say, “Don’t forget about immigration, don’t forget that some people don’t have the same point of view, don’t have the same destiny, don’t have the same place in French society.
” So I tried to be the one who was disturbing the conversation to make them remember that. But I think that at the end of the day what matters is not to address one community. This is a show that is supposed to address humanity, human beings.
So it’s not going to be all about the greatness and the glory of the host country? Can you imagine [something like that from] a country that is considered, very often, arrogant? It would have been really ridiculous to do this kind of ceremony and this kind of show for a country like France. We were, in a way, forced to try not to say what people were expecting from us: “France is the best, France is the most beautiful, France has the most interesting history, France this, France that..
.” People would have made fun of us and they would have been right, so we knew that we had to be very careful with this, and not to do something too patriotic or too proud of ourselves or too arrogant. We were forced to have a certain sense of humor.
Tune in to the Olympics opening ceremony tonight at 9:30 PM GCT on beIN, the official broadcaster for the Olympics 2024. This interview has been edited for length. by AMANDA RANDONE.
