Once I had my mind set on writing
Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein, I went through documentation
again. I looked up more Holmes books, comic books and movies, re-read
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of course, and also went through
countless Frankenstein films (although I can't say I learned a lot
from watching Blackenstein).
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| Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley |
One of the things that came out of my
research was the existence of a real Franckenstein family. That's
right, with a “c”. Their name is not a coincidence: Mary Shelley
was visiting Europe with her husband and Lord Byron when she wrote
the book, and they had been near Castle Franckenstein not long
before. In the book, they're a Swiss family, whereas the real family
is German.
The current Baron is Clement von und zu
Franckenstein, who happens to be... an actor! Starting as a bit
player in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (of course), he went
on to play bigger parts, with Jean-Claude Van Damme in Full
Contact, Bruce Willis in Death Becomes Her or Michael
Douglas in The American President (where Clement plays the
French president, despite being a German raised in the UK!). He was
also in another Mel Brooks film: Robin Hood, Men in Tights.
My script features characters based on his father Georg, his uncle
Clemens and his grandfather Karl. More on this matter later!
The
script came together easily enough: I had a map of the characters,
their relationships, the main plot and the subplots, and defining the
sequence of events was a natural process. Oddly enough, several
elements from Zorro vs Sherlock Holmes
ended up in this story: two antagonist brothers (something that
derived from The Sign of Four,
my favorite Holmes adventure)
I had
a first draft in June 2010 (the same month my first child was born,
would you call it a coincidence?), and I handed it to my wife and to
Jean-Noël. With their notes and a few new
ideas I had come up with, I made corrections and invited ten friends
to a group reading in September. We had a good talk afterwards,
especially about the ending – it was almost unchanged since the
time I was working on Zorro vs Sherlock Holmes,
and it didn't feel quite right. The rest of the script everyone
liked, but the ending was putting most people off. I came up with a
new version within two weeks, and had another reading in October,
with a group made of both people who knew the story, and people
who hadn't read any version yet. This time around, the reactions were very
positive, and it felt like the script was in the right place.
2011
Time
had come to think of how it could be brought to the screen. I had
written the script in French (the exact title then was Sherlock
Holmes contre Frankenstein!),
but when I was scanning casting ideas in my head, a lot of them were
English-speaking actors – which of course made sense, Holmes and
Watson being British characters. So I decided I should translate the
script into English. I was familiar with the language, but writing
19th century dialogue is different from writing an e-mail or even a
term paper. So I took my time, enlisted the help of a fat English
dictionary and Conan Doyle's full Canon, and came up with a version
that sounded English enough to me. A friend of mine introduced me to
a charming British lady called Stephanie Campion, who made a lot of
corrections and set up a public reading of the scripts with
professional English-speaking actors. The reading took place in
February 2011, in the parisian pub Carr's: it was a regular informal
event where the small audience would discuss a play or a script with the
author. The feedback was good there too, and it was great to have
real actors read the script out loud. I felt the relationship between
Holmes and Watson worked quite well, which was important to me –
Dario Costa and Damian Corcoran played the detective and the doctor.
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| Damian Corcoran & Dario Costa |
The next step was to reach out to
actors, production companies, and put the project on tracks. Or so I
thought. Remember, at that time I had no real idea of how the filmmaking
industry worked, and I knew absolutely no one there. So I sent out letters,
e-mails, to a few agents and French production companies. It took me
some time to realize that no French producer would touch in a
thousand years a project called 'Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein'.
There are barely any genre movies made in France, and the few that
are produced have a contemporary setting, or at least take place in
France. A film with British characters investigating a supernatural
matter in 19th century Germany is not something that the
French financing system will support. But I was more lucky with my
messages to agents: the first actor to express interest in the script
was Shane Briant. I was leaping with joy when I heard back from him,
and he said he would meet me (he lives in Australia, but was headed
to London and we saw each other in Paris). Hammer fans remember him
of course as Peter Cushing's assistant in Terence Fisher's Frankenstein and
the Monster From Hell, and I had named the Burgermeister in my
script after his character: Simon Helder. When we had this meeting in
August 2011, we discussed the script, Hammer films, etc., and he said
he would be happy to play the part and support the project. Not long
later, Clement von Franckenstein also said he really liked the
script, and wanted to be in the movie. It turned out nobody had ever
asked him to play Baron Frankenstein before me – I guess I'm more
candid than most!
At that point, I thought the best way
to move things forward was to create the means to produce the film
myself. But flying solo is a scary thing. So I contacted Jean-Noël, and asked him whether he would create a
production company with me. He said yes, and in a way, this is where
the story really begins!
