Eric Rochant: We’re in a new world with new rules

Eric Rochant famously brought the American showrunner model to France in 2015 with his hit Canal+ espionage thriller The Bureau, and he is now celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

The prestige drama not only became a colossal hit at home as the pay-TV service’s flagship series and overseas with sales to nearly 100 territories, it also changed the audiovisual fiction production landscape in France, kicking off a new wave of major talent moving from cinema to series.

Rochant and his The Oligarchs Production (TOP) partner Alex Berger imported a US production model complete with a writers room in order to continue to feed what became five seasons of 10-episodes with high production values and a unified voice.

While he is continuing to deploy such a model for both his own series and those that he has boarded as a producer, he tells Broadcast International that the concept has not stuck in his native France. “Not many people have taken on the role of showrunner in the way I imagined it and took it from the US,” he says, citing David Chase and David Simon as examples.

It’s important for the showrunner to make decisions that have a financial impact because that has artistic implications

“In France, broadcasters tell me they can’t find people who are writers-creators-directors at the same time, who control all of the production decisions both creative and financial.” As a result, he explains, “they have to find auteurs then find directors, which is hard in France where the director typically has the power and now is being asked to serve the showrunner. Everyone uses the term showrunner in France, but no one really does it.”

Rochant continues to operate as a one-man show, under his definition of showrunner, namely “a creator and screenwriter who never let’s go of his vision and never abandons his baby even if someone else is directing.”

He adds: “It’s important for the showrunner to make decisions that have a financial impact because that has artistic implications. There is no difference between the artistic process and the industrial process. Otherwise, the producer is making decisions for the auteur. From the beginning, I’ve maintained that the creator and main screenwriter of a series should also be the executive producer – the auteur should supervise everything from the actors to the set design and control everything.”

With this model in mind, Rochant launched Maui Entertainment in 2022 with backing from Federation, starting with eight-part series Everything Is Fine for Disney+ from showrunner Camille de Castelnau, who was a writer on The Bureau.

The Paris-set series about a family dealing with the illness of a child starring Virgine Efira, The Bureau’s Sara Girardeau, Nicole Garcia and Aliocha Schneider didn’t get a second season order after airing in France in 2023 then globally last year, but Rochant reveals that Maui and de Castelnau are developing another series for the streamer together, but details are under wraps.

At Maui Entertainment, even when Rochant isn’t showrunning a series, he says he remains as an “artistic producer” and works hand-in-hand with a showrunner like Castelneau to offer both financial and creative support. “I know the game,” he adds.

Other Maui Entertainment projects in the works include Isabel Coixet’s Someone Should Ban Sunday Afternoons, a modern-day French series set in Paris, created by Isabel Coixet, another well-known auteur from the world of feature films, for Arte.

The eight-episode series is a modern-day coming-of-age French series about a young girl with aspirations to become a film director who moves to Paris to be mentored by a famous American writer-director, but nothing goes as planned.

While Rochant says he and the company are open to co-productions, he remains adamant that the projects originate from a writer-creator. “Producers can approach us with projects on the condition that their project comes from an auteur – I’m not interested in producing series from producers.”

Building Bandi for Netflix

As a showrunner, Rochant’s long-anticipated next series to air following The Bureau will be Bandi, which will hit Netflix in mid-2026.

The series - about an ordinary family that dives into the drug trafficking world after the death of its matriarch - was created by Rochant and his daughter Capucine Rochant who, he explains, “supervises everything from the directing to the actors to the editing.”

Rochant helmed the script with Khris Burton and Gwenola Balmelle, with Jimmy Laporal-Tresor and Mathilde Vallet directing.

And he says the series produced by Maui for Netflix was inspired by another of the streamer’s series - Top Boy, which explores London’s drug gangs.

“We wanted to see if it was possible to do a French Top Boy, a series about drug trafficking with a young cast, and decided to set it in Martinique.” He says the series is “Top Boy meets Peaky Blinders meets Shameless”, citing its “humour and suspense” amidst darker themes.

“The creative challenge has been finding a balance between action and suspense and family emotion,” Rochant says of the upcoming eight-part series that he sees as spanning multiple seasons.

The series shot on location in Martinique from January through July of this year, and features non-professional actors mostly aged between 8-24 years old, found after what was a year-long casting process.

They employed as many local crew members as possible, but he explains “there weren’t many options,” so Rochant brought teams from Paris to train both technicians and screenwriters.

“We created an entire screenwriting school for this series,” he says, complete with over two sessions with around a dozen people each, completely free for participants chosen from an application process.

“They came to all of our brainstorming sessions, they were in the writers room,” says Rochant who personally led several masterclasses for the group. “It was focused on writing series and this series specifically” he says hoping many of the participants will pursue careers in screenwriting and come aboard for subsequent seasons.

Working with a major global streamer like Netflix, he says, was “not very different than with Canal+,” particularly since he reteamed with Pierre Saint-André, head of Netflix scripted series, with whom he worked on The Bureau when the latter was associate director of French fiction and international co-productions at Canal+.

Geopolitical pessimism and romance

Rochant is also returning to the spy drama genre with upcoming Canal+ series Secret People, an international thriller that follows five intelligence agents from the US, UK, China, Russia and France.

He describes the show as “the Game Of Thrones of intel” and imagines it as a multi-season series complete with “my signature ingredients of romance and humour” to balance the geopolitically-charged plotlines.

Agents on covert missions with a side of l’amour and subtle comic relief have become Rochant’s signature recipe over the years. Before The Bureau, set at the DGSE (France’s external security agency and its undercover agents), he explored the spy world in feature films The Patriots (about Mossad that bowed in Cannes’ competition in 1994) and Mobius in 2013, starring Jean Dujardin and Cecile de France as two agents who fall dangerously in love.

Secret People is still in development stage though the showrunner promises “an A-list international cast.”

We need to trust the intelligence of audiences – yes, people want to escape, they are anxious, but it is possible to propose both escape and also depth

While he remains in the same lane as his previous big and small screen spy-driven success stories, this time around, he says: “My next series cannot possibly be like The Bureau because the bureau was based on a world there the paradigm was the same and within that there were different stories. Today, the entire paradigm has changed.”

While his own passion for geopolitical plotlines has not wavered, he says the world has shifted dramatically. “The problem today is not only that the news is going more quickly, but that the world has completely changed. We’re in a new world with new rules. It is as if there was an earthquake and tectonic plates moved and we’re still trembling.”

The new world order, he describes is one based on “an empire logic, not multilateral with mutual rules like we had since World War II to avoid the next war. It’s a time of ‘might makes right’, we’re back to the 17th or 18thcentury where there is no regard for anyone, or alliances. Geopolitically, I’m very pessimistic. Things are going downhill.”

This has made launching the series an even more daunting task. “The scripts change all the time. Every time I write something, the world changes and I have to adapt.” Even if he says, like with The Bureau, “I try to tell stories that are immune to all such changes.”

In the meantime, he plans to continue to blend such geopolitical doom and gloom with more emotional, character-driven drama: “On an existential and human level, I’m still optimistic.”

Since the success of the The Bureau, Rochant says he has been in touch with US producers and broadcasters and has projects brewing, but nothing confirmed. Amazon US passed on a planned adaptation of Norman Mailer’s fictional chronicle of the CIA Harlot’s Ghosts, but Rochant says he could revisit it.

Rochant says he thinks the biggest challenge facing the series industry today is “staying creative and independent, but also realistic and presenting the world we’re living in as it is.”

For him, this means juxtaposing the current geopolitical climate with more audience-friendly storylines.

“American cinema of the 1970s was very critical, very political, very profound. Our biggest artistic challenge today is to find this same depth, otherwise it’s a carnival where we’re only seeing shock films for pure entertainment.

“We need to find that depth again. We need to trust the intelligence of audiences – yes, people want to escape, they are anxious, but it is possible to propose both escape and also depth.”