Four years later, I graduated from a French/American school with
a BA in
management and finance. And William Boquet came back. Instead of
looking for a regular job, I went on to work on a new episode for my
detective, entitled William Boquet dans la quatrième dimension
(William Boquet in the
Fourth Dimension). This
one would be a silent movie, shot in black & white (or rather in
an intense sepia monochrome), and would focus on everyone BUT William
Boquet. He would only show up in the last scene and kick the shit out
of the bad guys. This last idea came from the fact that I initially
thought I would play the character myself... which I ultimately
didn't. The part went to a friend called Pierre, who would later
return for two installments of the franchise. In a small but very
funny part, Matthieu Huvelin was being beaten up by two thugs; he would
eventually become a composer on a lot of my movies, including the
upcoming Sherlock Holmes vs
Frankenstein!
The first three films were shot on Hi-8
and VHS-C, this one was the first for which we used DV. It was also
the first episode to be edited on a computer, and not with a VCR
connected to the camcorder or to a Hi-Fi (no kidding, this is how the
others were edited and mixed). Apparently, it was entertaining enough
to be selected in a short film festival in Grenoble. Only two amateur
movies had made it into the selection, and we were running against 18
 |
| sketches for Avant-Garde |
films made with professional means. William Boquet 4 was very
fun to to make, and a lot of people seemed to like it. To this day,
it's still the best of the bunch, because things went a bit downhill
afterwards. This is one time in my life where I probably should have
stopped amateur filmmaking and started doing things properly. But I
went the lazy and cowardly route for a few years, paying my bills
with jobs I didn't care for, and sticking to making films with no crew, no budget and zero technical equipment.
That same summer, I made a short film
called Avant-Garde, about.... Frankenstein. So you might say
2003 was the first time I pitted “Sherlock Holmes” (a version of
him, at least) against Frankenstein, in a way. Avant-Garde
told the story of Victor Frankenstein creating his monster, then
dreaming that it survived through the 1930s, 60s, 90s and beyond. The
film was 12 minutes long, which is about half of an average William
Boquet, but there was an effort on costumes and lighting. It was also
the first time I used the name Marteau Films, as a mere joke: Marteau
is French for Hammer, and my favorite Frankenstein movies are the
Hammer productions with Peter Cushing.
2004-2007
One year later, I made a fifth William
Boquet, the only episode that would be shot outside of Paris and its
surroundings. L'Amour aux trousses (a pun spoofing the french
title for North by Northwest, where I replaced Death with
Love). We spent four days in Normandy, filming scenes on the beach
and in town, where the detective was being chased mostly by women who
wanted to rape him – and a few individuals who wanted to kill him
or mutilate him. We had a blast, but the film was another of these
no-budget, private-joke efforts that couldn't appeal to a lot of
people outside a small circle of friends.
After I spent almost two years on a
more ambitious film called Freudy (but again, without
professional means or a real crew), William Boquet returned for his weirdest adventure in 2006: Fax Bulle-d'O². Pierre was
playing the character for the third time, and I was directing, but
for the first time it wasn't from a script that I had written: it was
one of three episodes penned by Jean-Noël Georgel (the other two
were never filmed). It was a very strange story, where the world was
losing its colors around the FBI agent, who had made an enemy out of
his own subconscious double. It could have been exciting, but I
underestimated the complexity of making the final product
intelligible, and it ended up being quite a mess – my favorite
parts are the opening and closing credits! It was the second time
Matthieu was scoring one of my films (the first having been Freudy).
After that, another episode called
Repas Eternel (which had Boquet track down a cannibal) was
planned, with a friend directing and me playing the lead again –
eight years after Seven-Up. We started shooting a few scenes,
but the whole thing rapidly fell apart. Which is when I started
concentrating on writing something that could be made into a REAL
film. Not a 20-minute selfish surreal trip, but a feature film that a
normal movie-goer would be interested in! Sherlock Holmes vs
Frankenstein? Not yet, folks! I know, this is beginning to sound
like How I met your mother, but remember we're barely in 2008
at this point...
2008-2009
I called Jean-Noël and asked him if he
would write something really ambitious with me. He said yes, and we
got down to work. So here was the plan: to write a 100-page script
loosely based on a french comic book character, then send it to the author
and hope that he likes it. It was a very silly plan, for two reasons:
first, having the author approve your script would not be a guarantee
that it will make it to the screen; second, you could have the
problem we ended up having: when Jean-Noël and I contacted the author's agent,
we learned that the rights had already been optioned, and there was
no way our script would be read. They didn't even want to know the
pitch or anything, we just had to put our work in a drawer and move
on to the next project. It was the second feature-long script I'd
worked on, the first was called Old-Up and had gone through several versions from 2000 to
2003, and had ultimately been shelved (too expensive, too many
characters, too hard to keep the three writers focused on a same
project). Jean-Noël had already written and directed a no-budget
80-minute film a few years before. But this particular script could
have been our key to “real” filmmaking, if only we had chosen our
subject more wisely. There we were, having worked for almost a year
on a script (we had also made a short test-film which wasn't too bad –
but had very poor special effects!), and having no real plan for the
foreseeable future – apart from sticking to our day jobs.
The frustration that arose from this
situation drove me to my usual fix: William Boquet. I took the unused
footage for Repas Eternel and used it to spawn a seventh episode, Flou
(Blur). I played the detective once again, and put the
character in an uncomfortable situation: he wakes up one day almost
blind, his entire environment reduced to a blur. He starts picturing
everyone with his own face, and wonders how he's gonna solve the case
of missing person he's dealing with. Matthieu Huvelin scored this one
as well, and Jean-Noël plays a new FBI agent (one who had been
introduced in the previous installment), but the film is unlike any
of the previous entries. William Boquet has always been my double in
a way, and each film had mirrored something of my life at the point
it was made: Teddy was about leaving childhood, WB4 was
filled with the feeling of liberty I had when exiting business
school... but it was never deliberate. This seventh episode ended up
being too personal, and while it reflects one of the dearest periods
in my life (basically, how I realized that I had met my soulmate), it
doesn't make for a very good movie – except for my wife and I!
Flou was filmed in 2009,
completed in 2010, and remains to this day William Boquet's last
episode. I don't see the character returning any time soon, but if he
does, he won't be sporting a deerstalker hat. Days of dealing with a
Sherlock Holmes wannabe are long gone now.
