The filmmaker and director of the series “Hippocrates” took back his blouse during the first wave of the Covid. he publishes a book, “The Oath”, in which he looks back on his career.
Paris Match. You stopped practicing for almost ten years. Why go back to the hospital during the first wave?
Thomas Lilti. Last March, I had been shooting season 2 of “Hippocrates” for eight weeks, a series which tells how badly the hospital is. With the confinement, I found myself plugged into the television overnight, listening at 8 p.m. to the count of the number of deaths from the Covid and the doctors who were all calling for help. My family was safe, so I went back. And, with the production, we gave them some of our decor.
That is to say ?
All the hospitals were overwhelmed, but mine was now deserted. A shoot is a hundred people for weeks, an important stewardship. We started by bringing them our coffee machines, our food. Then I realized that, in some areas, we had more material than them. We transferred our IV feet, stretchers, trolleys …
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As we cannot set up the hospital abroad to take advantage of a cheap payroll, we bring in the doctors
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What struck you when you arrived?
I found a hospital even more dilapidated and disinherited than before, lacking everything and especially staff. Foreign doctors, temporary workers, temporary workers, take care of the services. This is the whole hypocrisy of the system: the hospital is a relocation upside down. As we cannot install it abroad to take advantage of a cheap payroll, we bring in the doctors. I discovered, on the other hand, the central place of computerization. The advantage is that a patient’s history is recorded. The downside is that everything takes a long time, the computers are old, the Intranet does not work well… For fifteen to twenty minutes with a patient, it then takes forty-five to write everything down, to code everything. And these codes seem to have the sole purpose of evaluating the cost of a patient and possibly developing statistics.
How do you feel when you put on your white coat?
I come away very moved from my first day. I found these caregivers that I loved so much, those who, despite the fatigue, the very degraded working conditions generating a lot of suffering, scramble to tinker with solutions, overcome material difficulties, without any recognition. This questions me. Why did I stop medicine when we need more doctors than filmmakers? Why does it seem necessary to me to tell about the care, again and again, through my films? Why am I going back for the Covid? I felt, like many, a need for introspection. I started recording myself, without imagining making a book out of it. My mode of expression is the filmed story. But the fact of writing forced me to question things that I think I haven’t dug into fiction enough.
Thomas Lilti © Claire Delfino/Paris Match
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Are you more of a doctor or a filmmaker?
By returning to the hospital on a voluntary basis, I did not feel perfectly legitimate: having not practiced for a long time, I could not claim to be a doctor again. I first did handling, I especially gave a hand, made patients wait, helped find their medical history. After a short month, I had to go home: having failed to pay my contribution to the Council of the Order for years, I was no longer insured. So I could no longer exercise. However, on the other hand, my legitimacy as a filmmaker has always been questioned because I am a doctor and I did not study cinema!
This question of legitimacy runs through your book.
For a long time, I didn’t feel out of place. Medicine is almost twenty years of my life, and the hospital is a monster that encompasses you: we sleep there, we live there, we make friends there, we fall in love … However, I was bored there sometimes the treatment is very repetitive, you always have to ask the same questions and I had the feeling that I could never do enough for the sick. It was guilty, it made me suffer and I was not prepared for it. I felt like things escaped me, that I did them because I had been told it was like that, and everything led me to do them that way – my long studies, the pressure of my family, my doctor father, the role of my symbolic heritage. I had this feeling, very common, to miss the point. I dreamed of an elsewhere where, all of a sudden, everything would make sense in who I am.
Your book gives the keys to understanding how reality invests your work.
It is true ! I tell in 160 pages a little all the material of my films, the manufacturing secrets: who I am, where I come from, the people I met, this medicine that I liked to practice. I am no longer hidden behind a fictional double. I wondered about the ego dimension of telling intimate things, it was a drag until the end. But now it’s too late, the book is out!
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I am passionate about how people relate to their work, especially the youth
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Does it mark the end of an era, that of the filmmaker of medicine?
Who knows ? For a long time it was said that I was successful only because I mastered the subject, that I would be unable to talk about anything else. At one point, I thought so too. It doesn’t worry me anymore. Maybe I’ll make twenty more medicine films! But if I dig, it’s not so much the latter that fascinates me as the relationship of people to their work, especially that of youth. I am very attached to tell these young people invested in their work. Usually they are often portrayed idle, partying, delinquent or in extraordinary stories, but rarely in the day-to-day life of what is professional learning when it, or lack thereof, is at the heart of our lives. . Another theme that runs through my films is the collective. I think a lot about civil disobedience, a big topic, I believe, in the months to come. But disobeying on your own is just outlawing yourself. It only makes sense if it’s shared.
Fiction also precedes reality. In season 1 of “Hippocrates”, a service is quarantined. Was it premonitory?
To make a realistic series on a hospital that is cracking all over the place, you needed a romantic starting point. I used a quarantine of doctors that I had experienced, but dramatizing it so that young interns find themselves alone in charge. What’s funny is that with my co-authors, we felt that the word quarantine was not the right one, but we never found the word confinement! This term so familiar today did not exist in our language two years ago. For season 2, I worried: does it still make sense with the Covid, this tsunami for caregivers? She tells the hospital drowning. And he drowns so much that, symbolically, the first episode shows the flood of emergencies forced to settle in the internal medicine department where our heroes work. It was the romantic trick! It is a metaphor for the health crisis which overflows the hospital.
Also read.Louise Bourgoin: “Hippocrate, this is my first real series”
Will there be a season 3 of “Hippocrates”?
Probably. But a series eats everything. Season 2 is 127 days of shooting, there is no family life, no leisure, life stops. I don’t know yet if I’m ready to resume. Telling the hospital in a realistic way with the social and political dimension that I try to bring, ignoring the Covid, seems complicated to me. It’s difficult to project, the pandemic has changed everything. She tackled the world of skincare, but also that which is mine now: culture. I am terrified of the state of the culture. Its distribution is almost wiped out. We live in a capitalist, rich, inegalitarian society, where culture is often considered non-essential. Yet it creates bonds between all of us. So what is certain is that I, the ex-doctor, as long as I am given the opportunity, I would like to continue writing, filming, telling stories.
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