A series of accidents on the way between home and set in the United States — presented by Maxence Muller, followed by an update on the French situation, by Olivier Bertrand.

A letter on the subject of working hours on American film sets, signed by fourteen ASC cinematographers, has been published addressed to the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers). It invites us to reflect on how our own working hours have been evolving.

The French situation is of course different, and it would be wrong to think we can talk about the French and American situations in the same terms, but we are all regularly confronted with unreasonable working hours, hazardous to health and harmful to the quality of our work.

That is why we felt it important to relay this letter, translated into French, so that the dialogue now beginning in the United States might potentially find an echo on our own shores.

“We are Directors of Photography of Local 600 writing to express our growing concern about the dangers associated with long working hours, a practice that persists despite the medical evidence of the damage caused by exhaustion. The most obvious sign is the number of car accidents our colleagues have suffered over the past several years — including, most recently, over the very weekend that saw negotiations begin.

This past year has shown that when employers and crews work together to confront a global problem, it is possible to protect people on set while still successfully wrapping even the most ambitious projects. It is well past time to use that same intelligence and those same resources, now proven effective, to increase daily rest periods and implement weekend breaks to safeguard the mental and physical health of every crew member. The time to create lasting change is now.”

The letter is signed by the following cinematographers, a list that includes some of the ASC’s most prestigious members:

John Toll, Roger Deakins, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, Erik Messerschmidt, John Lindley, Paul Cameron, Jim Denault, Ellen Kuras, Donald A. Morgan, Rodrigo Prieto, Eric Steelberg, Amy Vincent, Mandy Walker, Robert Yeoman.

For more information, and the letter in its original version, here is the source article on deadline.com.

As for the situation on French sets, there is no data available to point to an increase in road accidents comparable to what is happening in the United States. Furthermore, the collective bargaining agreements governing our working conditions (National Collective Agreement for Film and Advertising Production, see here; Collective Agreement for Audiovisual Production, see here) offer a number of protections — unheard of on the other side of the Atlantic — against excessive hours, through a fairly dissuasive scale of overtime premiums: rising overtime rates (50% from the 9th hour, 100% from the 11th); a so-called “continuous day” premium (daily wage increased by 50% of the hourly rate if you work beyond 6h30 without a break); a so-called “early hours” premium (one hour of overtime owed each time the mandatory 11-hour rest period between the end of one day and the start of the next is cut into by even an hour); prep hours and wrap hours, even travel time, counted as working hours; premiums for Saturdays worked (+25%), Sundays worked (+50%), public holidays (+100%), and so on.

So many rules that raise wages, so many safeguards protecting crews — cinematographers included — from excessive hours. In principle, at least.

Because in reality, ignorance of the details of these collective agreements is growing among the vast majority of technicians — an ignorance fostered by a general discourse that has, for decades, systematically discredited any union action in favour of an ideology of all-against-all competition, and an ignorance that almost no school or training programme does anything to remedy (by offering, for instance, a few hours of coursework devoted to the social conditions under which our professions are practised). What’s more, a good many productions find ways around these clauses, even though they are the result of decades of negotiation between the unions of our industry.

They find ways around them, and around us, in various forms — here are a few (a non-exhaustive list):

• Sometimes offering rates that have been revised downward. This starts with a systematic refusal to account for inflation through an annual reassessment of union rates (in audiovisual production, for instance, rates have not been reassessed since… 2004 — implying a drop in real wages, in absolute terms, of -15 to -20%). Against this state of affairs, there is little but collective action to make our voices heard in upcoming renegotiations. Sadly, it must be admitted that we, technicians of recorded entertainment, and even more so we cinematographers, are far too few to be unionised (which correspondingly weakens the striking power of our representative unions, the SNTPCT and the SPIAC-CGT), nor are we sufficiently engaged with the very notion of collective action — whether among cinematographers, or between the different tiers of a single crew.
• Taking it for granted that crews will accept, without protest, seeing the 39 hours of a single week spread across irregular schedules — for example, a 10-hour day on set on Tuesday, “compensated” by a 6-hour day on Thursday — so as to avoid paying overtime at its proper rate, paying it instead at the standard hourly rate. What was a rarely used tolerance a few years ago has become systematic, and is now imposed on the assistant director when drawing up the shooting schedule.
• Offering flat-rate fees (sometimes discounted relative to a certain bloc of hours, sometimes slightly increased, but requiring the technician in question to no longer seek payment for any overtime, even if it should run into the dozens of hours). Here too, productions try to negotiate case by case, often with different treatment depending on who they’re dealing with and which role is involved… It would then be desirable for all members of the technical crew to be transparent with one another, so as to present a united front to the production… Not easy for the cinematographer, for whom this means putting themselves at risk — not only with an occasionally by-the-book employer, but also, and especially, with the director, who might reproach them for not showing flexibility with their own working hours.
• These various strategies often pile up on so-called shoestring, run-and-gun shoots, such as “web ads”, “YouTube music videos”, and features budgeted under one million euros — and thus “outside the agreement”.

Speaking of “shooting for the web”, it’s worth noting the abuse made of the so-called “non-specialised” pay scale in the audiovisual agreement, which establishes, among other delights, that for a shoot “for the web”, pay levels roughly 20% below the scale used for TV fiction shoots — TV movies or series — apply.

Why this reduction, which one of our unions (the SNTPCT) has fought and continues to fight, but not the other (the SPIAC-CGT, which ratified the agreement)? The agreement, in its first version, dates back to 2004. Back then, “shooting for the web” often meant making do with a PD100 and a reflector — that is, shooting with limited technical resources, and a supposedly lower skill level. But since then, thanks to streaming platforms, we all shoot “for the web” with technical resources (and therefore skill levels) equivalent to those of TV movies or features — and arguably skills that could be considered superior, given that we are expected to deliver the same level of quality for a higher ratio of usable minutes per day of shooting.

In that case, offering lower pay on the pretext that “it’s for the web” increasingly amounts to sheer arrogance, and contempt for our skills — and, to return to the subject at hand, for our working hours, across every trade on set (and even more so for the locations/production department, first to arrive, last to leave).

In the end, while we have not (not yet) observed an increase in the number of road accidents in our ranks, a study remains to be done, one that would document burnout, impacts of every kind on private life, and other consequences of ever-lengthening hours, under ever-increasing pressure. No doubt a subject for a future Union discussion meeting.