“The island of love”: Productions Déferlantes shares the villa of Las Terrenas with other countries

MISE À DAY

Productions Déferlantes deploys a new business model internationally by sharing the villa it has occupied since last year in the Dominican Republic for the filming of The island of love. 

For a week, Sweden has been the first country to shoot its own version of the format there Love Island.

The Swedes have settled in Las Terrenas and enjoy a house fully equipped for their needs, an idea that germinated in Montreal.

“It becomes service production. We are not responsible for their content, but we take care of everything related to installation, technical equipment, decor, logistics, hotel accommodation, etc. Everyone wins financially working like that,” detailed Monday the president of Productions Déferlantes, Benoît Clermont, in an interview with the QMI Agency.

As soon as the Swedes have packed up, a hundred Quebecers will replace them under the hot Dominican sun for the filming of the third season of The Island of Love, whose broadcast is scheduled this spring on TVA in “refreshed decors”. We will also know shortly which comedian will provide the narration alongside the new host, Olivier Dion.

The new host of “The Island of Love”, Olivier Dion

Several countries have visited the site located by the sea, with the complicity of the holder of the Love Island format, the British network ITV, with which Déferlantes maintains increasingly close links. Mr. Clermont and executive producer Nancy Charest will go to the Love Island Exchange in the Netherlands in March to promote the property of Las Terranas, which is owned by an investor.

The challenge is “to align the shooting and broadcasting schedules with ours,” said Jean-Philippe Dion, who is vice-president, content and strategy, at Production Déferlantes, in addition to being a shareholder in the company. with Mr. Clermont.

The fact that the format is reproduced almost identically throughout the world simplifies the sharing of the villa. “What we are most proud of is that our Quebec expertise is put forward and we realize that we do a lot with little in Quebec. We are very ingenious and we produce quality,” said Ms. Charest, who has just returned from Las Terrenas, where she hosted the Swedish team.

The Montreal company founded in 2015 also produces the adaptation of the I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! format, owned by ITV and renamed Sortez-moi d'ici! in Quebec. Hosted by Jean-Philippe Dion and Alexandre Barrette, this reality show shot in Costa Rica will be broadcast from Sunday, February 19, at 6:30 p.m., on TVA. Jean-Philippe Dion is also at the helm of True Nature, whose fifth season is in full swing, also on Sundays, an evening increasingly signed by Productions Déferlantes on TVA, if we also take into account “Masked singers”.

Working with everyone the networks

Productions Déferlantes has just added to its mandates with the Quebecor Media channel the production of 80 shows of Sucré Salé with a new host, Mélanie Maynard . It also collaborates more and more with Télé-Québec for its cultural meetings – think of Michel Tremblay in eighty times and Nelly Arcan – The fury of what I think –, without closing the door to projects with Radio-Canada and Noovo.

< p>“We set up a development team last summer, in particular with the arrival of France Lauzière, who is there as a strategic advisor, precisely to think about the avenues we can take to develop new ways of producing, new niches, new associations, both internationally and in Quebec, underlined Jean-Philippe Dion. We are developing our own intellectual property and our formats, things will be announced shortly.”

And do we plan to venture into fiction? “We want to be bigger than Fabienne [Larouche]! joked the producer and host. Of course we would like that one day, but everything in its time.”

Nearly thirty permanent workers work for Productions Déferlantes, which calls on nearly 2,000 freelancers over the course of same year.