The discovery in the archives of the French National Audiovisual Institute of a romantic soap opera from the 1960s filmed in a nuclear centre and presenting the work of a team of researchers and technicians, sparked the idea of using this unique material to support interviews with workers of the nuclear field. More precisely, images captured from the show were used to stimulate the interviews over everyday life in this highly technical and carefully managed environment. The collected testimonies prove to be surprisingly concrete and precise on the practical elements of the controversial subject that are often times occulted by stereotypical discourse and silences. The research findings invite to reflect on the contributions of video elicitation to sociological investigation, especially to avoiding the risk of imposing problematic, even threatening questions to the interviewees. In order to illustrate this point, the article mobilizes interview samples that clearly demonstrate how the use of fictional images influences the recruitment of respondents and the provoking of original accounts rather than of reiterations of polemical debates on the subject of nuclear power. Excerpts of the filmed interviews can be seen in the online appendices of the journal. The experiment underscores fictional material’s potential to communicate the sociologist’s stance to the interviewees and to encourage them to collaborate with the researcher.