In 1997, I was floating through high
school with no real assiduity, except in theater class. I was 15 and
in the equivalent of Junior Year. The year before, I had made a short
film with a classmate named Jean-Noël Georgel. We first intended it
to be a “Tale from the Crypt”, but then it became an odd story of
nightmares and surreal humor, shot with a camcorder and left
unfinished after one of the actresses went missing (this was before
cell phones and e-mails, it was hard to find someone when he wasn't in
the phone book).
Jean-Noël had then moved to Lyons with
his family, so I found a new bunch of people to make movies with. One of them
started writing a script about a private detective and the murder of
a teddy bear. It wasn't going anywhere, so he dropped it. I asked
Emmanuel if I could take the premice and write my own script from it,
and he had no problem with that – he even went on to play the
detective. It was the start of a saga that would last 13 years.
I had to come up with a name and personality for the hero: my love for puns drove me to chose William Boquet ('bilboquet' is the french word for cup-and-ball game), and he took elements from various iconic sleuths: he was an untidy bachelor, acted cynical, wore a trenchcoat and yes, a deerstalker hat. Which pretty much established him as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes wannabe. The movie was logically titled Teddy, and had William Boquet inteviewing the inhabitants of the building where the teddy bear was murdered. Again, it was a surreal murder comedy, probably influenced by the TV series The Avengers (John Steed and his women, not Iron Man and his pals). We shot it in three afternoons with two camcorders, and it looks pretty awful. There was only one copy of the script, which was hand-written on a notebook, and we managed to misplace it halfway through the shoot. I had to tell the actors what their lines were before each scene (the script was recovered a few days later under my bed, and I realized then that I had forgotten a few lines and jokes in the process). Beside William Boquet, the film introduced a character called Fax Bulle-d'Air, a paranoid FBI agent inspired by Fox Mulder; I realized a few years later, when I discovered
16-year-old me as William Boquet |
1998
A year later, a friend of mine called
Bastien encouraged me to write a sequel. He knew I had a few ideas
for a 'William Boquet universe', with a gallery of supporting
characters that had yet to be developed. I wrote this sequel under
the title Viande Froide (Cold Meat), and introduced
police commissioner Lacroûte, who behaved a bit like the
commissioner Gordon from the 60s Batman series: each time a case was
brought to his attention, he instantly called William Boquet to solve
it for him. The guy only spent his day reading books and drinking
beers. FBI agent Fax Bulle-d'Air was also returning, and was revealed
to have a caring wife, who hired Boquet to protect her husband.
Viande Froide was directed by Bastien, who had me play William
Boquet in place of Emmanuel, who wasn't interested in returning.
Again, three days of shooting, horrible camcorder image and cheesy
lines delivered by teenage amateur actors. Hey, what did you expect?
1999
Another year later, I was finally
finishing high school, and decided to shoot a final William Boquet
episode (or so I thought) called Seven-up. I was playing the
detective again, and directing myself (which I found very
uncomfortable, even on such a light, no-budget production). The story
was a spoof of David Fincher's Seven, with a mysterious killer making up his
own list of deadly sins: Ugliness, Bad Taste, etc. In the last
scene, we understood he had been killing people who had annoyed
William Boquet at some point, and then he shot
himself for being
the embodiment of the seventh “sin”: intolerance. Seven-up
was shot in July 1999, and probably required 9 or 10 days of filming.
It was a bit better than the two previous ones, I think, and was a
lot more graphic: there were several violent murder scenes, one rape,
and Boquet ended with the blood of the murderer all over his face and
clothes.
During high school, I also spent some
time writing and drawing a comic book called Schtounks. It was
about a war between two people called the Schtounks and the Schtonks
(confusing, I know). One of the characters was a detective called
Scherloc Tounk, inspired by... you know who. There was also a
scientist called Professor Von Chlok, who used body parts to create a
monster called Alioun. For his lab, I drew inspiration from the
promotional stills for Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein.
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