Cannes 2016

Now that we're back from Cannes, it's time to debrief. What happened there? First, we got a lot of exposure on Parkland's booth: the poster was attracting people's attention, and we were able to show them the first few minutes of the film, which were not quite finished (sound mix is still a few days away) but were good enough to start a conversation.

Usually at the film market, sensational posters are used to promote very cheap movies with low production values. In our case, the footage always surprised the viewers because... well, it looked good. Shane Briant is very classy, John Lebar is menacing, Stephanie Campion is a perfectly british Mrs Hudson... Those of you who pledged for the DVD on the crowdfunding campaign should be able to check for yourself when you receive it in a few weeks. As for the others, the campaign is still open, you can join the project right now if you want to be a part of it: igg.me/at/holmes-vs-frank

What else happened there? Lots of meetings regarding possible coproductions, sales of our movies Revenge, The Girl with Two Faces and House of VHS (which will be on DVD in the UK in September, under the title Ghosts in the Machine) and of Ian Powell's Razors (which will also be released in the UK in a few months)...

But of course, the film we all want to see come to life is Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein. Any good news on this side? Probably, yes. We still can't announce who will play Holmes and Watson, but the financing part is progressing nicely, and we're still looking at shooting in Belgium soon. Keep supporting the movie by joining the Facebook page and the Twitter account, by getting the book from Amazon (version française disponible bientôt !), and by mentioning it to everyone around you. Needless to say, we would rather be filming right now than wait a few more months!

Favourite titles and posters from Cannes film market

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is not a walk in the park. If you just set up a page and leave it there for a month, you can't expect people to show up and contribute out of nowhere. So you have to work constantly on your campaign, sharpen your communication skills... and unless you have a whole team working with you, you will probably get behind schedule. I wanted to keep posting on this blog throughout the campaign, sharing thoughts and updates, talking about Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein films in general, etc. But here we are, 4 days to the end, and this is the first article I write!

Let's share the Indiegogo link right here, because we don't want to forget that piece of information: http://igg.me/at/holmes-vs-frank

The campaign has been very rewarding so far: the goal has been met with time to spare, and now we've raised the bar to €40,000. A lot of people have shown support, sometimes unexpectedly. Many people from the French Sherlock Holmes Society (SSHF) have contributed, and Belgian Sherlockian artist Jean-Claude Mornard has been extremely enthusiastic and generous. Other supports have included famed Sherlock Holmes specialists Roger Johnson, Leslie Klinger, Howard Ostrom and the Baker Street Babes (sounds like a band), Charles Prepolec, David Whitehead - some of them are also Frankenstein or Hammer fans. My first feature film House of VHS has been screened for the first time three days ago, and several people contributed to the campaign after watching it – sometimes with a big sum, which can be considered a good sign!

People have different reasons for contributing – some of them want to see Shane Briant's return as Simon Helder, others want Ben Syder in a Holmes movie again, and others just like what they've seen of the project so far. Once the campaign is over, it will be my responsibility to make everyone happy, and deliver a movie that is entertaining, respectful and unique. And hopefully it will be able to please even the ones who have been snarling at the mere sight of the title.

In four days the campaign will be over, and the amount raised at that date will determine the leverage we will have to raise additional funds and make the film. So the higher it is, the easier it will be to get a big budget and an exciting movie. And it's important to have a list of names to show when financiers ask: “WHO WANTS TO SEE SHERLOCK HOLMES VS FRANKENSTEIN?” Well, do you?

The other side of Cannes: film markets

While most people see Cannes or Berlin as posh festivals where a bunch of stars drink champagne and rub their feet on a prestigious red carpet, there is also a whole other side that is mostly known to industry professionals: film markets.

Getting a film made and seen is not only a creative process involving preparation, shooting and post-production. It's also a business, as is evident when you walk the corridors of one of the major film markets. There are only a fistful of them: Berlin EFM (European Film Market) in February, Cannes in May, the Los Angeles AFM (American Film Market) in November, and a few others in Hong Kong, Dubai, and now in Montreal and Bruxelles for horror and fantasy movies.

The innocent passersby will have a hard time sorting out which film is already completed (and sometimes available in some territories), and which film is still only a title and a poster, waiting for filming or still looking for funding. A quick look at the projects reveals that even today, 40 years after the release of Jaws, there is still an incredible amount of love for shark movies: Sharknado comes to mind, of course, but the market also bears titles such as Sky Sharks, Sharktopus, Atomic Shark, 2-Headed Shark Attack, 3-Headed Shark Attack or even the incredible Raiders of the Lost Shark. If you don't have sharks in the film, you probably should attach a strategic actor to your cast: Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren are still incredibly popular on an international level, as are Gary Daniels, Eric Robert, Danny Trejo and Michael Madsen. Of course, having a film with both Dolph Lundgren and a shark is a double win, as the producers of Shark Lake obviously know.

In a market overflooded with very low budget movies and prefinanced action flicks, it is really hard to secure funding for an ambitious movie like Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein. Until there's a strategic name on the poster, or an indisputable wave of interest for the project, our film remains one of the many posters waiting in line for money. In order to speed things up, we will be running a big crowdfunding campaign starting next Monday, to raise 25,000€ and begin filming a few scenes. If we can pull off this stunt, the rest of the budget will be much easier to assemble – and you will finally get to see Shane Briant, Clement von Franckenstein and a few other familiar faces in an exciting gothic mystery.

Join the effort on Indiegogo next week if you want to watch Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein in the near future and see your name in the credits!

2012-2013: Doubting, waiting, rewriting

At the end of the summer 2012, things were starting to slow down. We were getting messages from very interesting people wondering about the project, like Oscar-winning makeup artist Dave Elsey (Star Wars ep III, Mission Impossible, X-Men First Class - he won the Oscar for Wolfman, together with Rick Baker), who said he would love to be involved. But what more was there to do for Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein, until funding would come together? So I took some time for other projects. First, I wrote a script called The Werewolf Mummy, an adventure/horror story set during the crusades. Jean-Noël and I also had a pet project: a film version of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, so I worked on developing that script too. And of course, I started working on Jane Clark's movie Slate & Kelly, a buddy cop story set in Paris.

By the end of 2012, I was worried to realize that the company had been in existence for one year, and Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein was still not happening. I started to think that maybe we had aimed too high, too fast, and maybe a microbudget film would be a good way to climb our way up to a serious budget. So I put the first hand to a script called House of VHS, which was designed to use only one location (a house), a supernatural menace (VHS) and a total cast of no more than six characters.

2013

Berlin 2013

During that time, Parkland Pictures and I were discussing the script for Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein, and it became clear that it could use a real rewrite. To work on it, producer John Cairns brought in a seasoned writer called Stephen Marians, who used to be a production and writing partner of actor Simon Ward (Peter Cushing's reluctant assistant in Hammer's Frankenstein must be destroyed). Stephen came up with his own version of the script, that I was able to read right after the Berlin Film Market, in March 2013. Then we spent a weekend in London, with Stephen and the Parkland people, examining page by page his version and mine, and sorting out what to keep in each – and what to add, change, etc. I went home with a pile of notes, and assembled the new and improved version of the script.

The final version came together during Cannes, in May. During that same festival, I had a few good meetings about the project, and in June, I went on to pitch it to finance people thanks to a selective program run by a group called Peacefulfish. What I heard there could be summarized as: “sounds great, but what have you done before, where's your first feature film?” Well, luckily enough, my first feature happened to be on its way.

2012: Marteau

Marteau Films Production was incorporated in December 2011, the same month I quit my day job. The plan was simple, and at the same time incredibly ambitious: to figure out how to produce Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein as a French/English genre film, then move on to other projects. At first, things went smoother than I would have thought: talented actors and award-winning crew members were easy to contact, and responded very positively to the script. Within four months, we had a commitment from UK sales company Parkland Pictures to handle the movie. But then came the hard part: financing the project. It took a while to realize that the initial plan wouldn't work. I didn't give up right away on getting French funding, which was a mistake. People wouldn't understand why I wanted to film both in French and English, and French TV channels wouldn't follow us on a genre film. I eventually gave up on the idea of filming in French, which was foolish from the start. But hey, one needs to learn from his mistakes!

Among the first people I met was director of photography Jérôme Alméras. He suggested we shot a short test film, to show as proof of concept. We decided it had to be ready in time for Cannes 2012, and got down to work. The location would be an underground place which used to be owned by monks. The actors would be Dario Costa as Sherlock Holmes (remember, he played the part in the public reading a year before), and Angèle Vivier as a screaming victim of the monster (she will play Christina, the innkeeper's mute daughter, in the movie). Costumes would be designed by Pierre-Jean Larroque, an Emmy and César winner with a taste for period pieces. And we hoped to have a great monster with crazy prosthetics... until we realized how little time and money we had. We had almost none of either. So we settled for a close-up of the monster's eye, which ended up being quite effective. We had a cold sweat a few days before filming, when Jérôme learned that he couldn't be there due to an important meeting for the film he was about to make with Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson (Love Punch). But his assistant Simon Blanchard prepped the shots with him beforehand, using the storyboard drawn by my wife Lucie, and everything went smoothly on set. In fact, I was happy to keep the crew as small as possible, because it felt strange to have so many people working around me: two makeup artists, the costume designer, two unit managers, a propmaster, and four people for the photography (we used an Alexa camera). They were all intrigued by the fact that I didn't have at least one assistant director, but I told them I never had any! Shane Briant provided a deep voice over, Matthieu Huvelin crafted a great music, and the teaser turned out to be pretty acceptable, eventually making it into two festivals (which wasn't the initial plan at all!)

Cannes 2012 was interesting, but Jean-Noël and I went there unprepared, having made no appointment beforehand, and kind of hoping meetings would happen spontaneously. We were partly right, because we met American director Jane Clark, who told us about a film she wanted to make in France – and we're working on it with her now. But we didn't find a pile of money waiting for us, or anyone ready to finance with their eyes closed an expensive film from a first-time director.

After Cannes, I went location scouting in Belgium. I had the best guide in the world: actor Eric Godon, who will play innkeeper Johann Klein in our film. We visited castle Reinhardstein, near the German border, and found all the places we needed in the area: the forest, the village, the inn, the Burgermeister's office... I came back with a good idea of what the film would look like. We were supported by the French Sherlock Holmes Society and its president Thierry Saint-Joanis, who said he would lend all the furnishing and props needed for the Baker Street set. At that moment, we were pretty confident that the film was about to get made, to the point where we issued a press release in June, right before I left for Belgium. When I returned, numerous websites had spread the info, and a few magazines had mentioned Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein with our promotional poster (by Gil Jouin, who had designed with his father Michel the French posters for Return of the Jedi, Young Sherlock Holmes, etc). A lot of people thought that filming was imminent. Well, it turned out it wasn't. Two years later, we haven't even started. Is everything ready? Yes. What happened since then? Wait till next entry!