In the new Pixar film “Buzz Lightyear”, François Civil lends his voice to the famous space ranger. A first for the French actor, who has the heavy task of passing after Richard Darbois, the French voice of the character in the “Toy Story” saga.
Buzz Lightyear is back in theaters
Three years after it last appeared on screens in Toy Story 4, Buzz Lightyear is back in our lives. Except for one detail. Indeed, if the confusion was initially in order, with the studio which had communicated that the film would be on the “real” Buzz which inspired the toy, a card at the beginning of the film is a little more precise. Buzz Lightning is simply the movie that Andy discovered when he was little. The toy of Toy Story is therefore the figurine taken from the character of this film.
A childhood dream for François Civil
Since this new movie isn’t about the toy, but about the fictional character that inspired it, Pixar decided to give it a new voice. In the United States, Chris Evans was chosen. In France, the honor went to François Civil, who measures the chance he had to succeed Richard Darbois (the voice of Buzz in the saga Toy Story):
It’s both creepy (…) and a child’s love. We couldn’t do something completely opposite to what Richard Darbois had done, who has such a recognizable voice, and who accompanied our childhood (…) so I kept it in the back of my mind . Especially on certain words, certain ways of saying things, certain phrasing at times. Afterwards I also had the original version of Chris Evans to guide me.
But the actor was also able to take certain liberties with the direction taken by Chris Evans for the American version:
Sometimes I thought it was some kind of space OSS. A super self-confident guy, who always has the right line, but who fails half the time.
The biggest difficulty
For François Civil, this dubbing experience was the first of his career. An exercise that was not always easy to grasp:
The hardest thing for me was accepting that at some point we couldn’t retouch anymore (…) On a movie set we do the take, and we pretty much know what we have done when it’s over. There, we listen again right away, all the details (…) and once we’ve done the five takes, we say to ourselves that it’s one of those that will be in the film. It was terrible enough to live with.
