Getting ready

All right, now that we're through the first phase of crowdfunding, with more than 30,000€ already raised, the time has come for filming Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein. Yay! Which means assembling the cast and crew, sorting out the dates, prepping costumes, sets and special effects, storyboarding the scenes... And we're only talking about the first few scenes of the film, the ones that we will be able to shoot thanks to the crowdfunding campaign.

Phase two will include securing the rest of the budget, and hopefully getting some additional help from the crowd in doing so. If we can get the numbers to 40,000 by the end of December, we will film a few scenes with Shane Briant himself in early 2016. Then the main shoot will be in May 2016, if everything goes smoothly (which will be the case, right?)

If you haven't contributed yet, or feel like returning in order to take the campaign to the next level, you're very welcome to join now: http://igg.me/at/holmes-vs-frank

Remember you can watch the original test film on the page, and also listen to a few excerpts from the script, recorded during a public reading in Paris:

If you want a taste of the story before the film even hits the screens, prepare yourself for the script's novelization, which is currently being written by British author David Whitehead. Readers already know him under his pen name Ben Bridges, which he has been using for an impressive number of westerns. He recently wrote the novelization of the movie Day of the Gun with Eric Roberts.

The great detective is no stranger to David, who has already written several original Sherlock Holmes stories, and is also an avid Hammer Horror fan, which makes him the perfect match for a story called "Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein".

As if prepping a shoot and financing a feature wasn't enough, we are also in the process of finding distribution for my first film House of VHS. Festivals, video release... Stay tuned for a few announcements and surprises very soon on these subjects too.

2013-2014: House of VHS

Trying to produce and direct a film like Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein, when you don't have the money, the experience or the reputation, is a bit hot-headed. The first step, I had been told by financiers, was to go microbudget for a first feature directorial effort. I couldn't really make Sherlock Holmes on a microbudget, so I concentrated on a script that would use as few resources as possible. House of VHS: a haunted house movie, with six characters and a supernatural element. Writing it was a blast, and we decided to film in a house owned by Jean-Noël and his family, located in the Center of France. We set filming dates in August 2013, and started working on pre-production and financing simultaneously... in March. Fast-tracking the project was a good way to make it happen, but also a gamble: what would happen if we couldn't pull it off? Five months before filming, we had zero cast and crew, very little money, and a script that was still a bit deliberately loose (it was designed to be adapted to the actors in due time).

In April, we travelled to the house and took a lot of pictures. I had never seen it before, and being there allowed me to make a few changes in the script, in order to take advantage of what the location had to offer. Then we started casting: in June, we had our first casting call, where we met thirty actors and actresses (out of 270 applications, which was way more than we had expected!). Four actors stood out: Isabel McCann, Delphine Lanniel, Morgan Lamorté and Nafees Hamid. However, we still had a few people to meet, and we needed to cast the last two characters. Two weeks later, we had this second round of casting for House of VHS, with the four actors above and a few new faces, among which Florie Vialens (now called Florie Auclerc-Vialens) and Ruy (who calls himself Ewen Blumenstein). We had found six talented actors who worked really well with each other, and were all very excited to be a part of this project.

Then we gathered the crew. A small one, to be honest: the budget and the house only allowed us to have a full crew of six people, including Jean-Noël and me. We shoehorned in the planning the presence of an SFX makeup artist for two days, but the rest of the gang was only comprised of:

• director of photography
• his assistant
• sound recordist
• unit manager

To be fair, we would have needed twice as many people and twice as much time, but complaining would have led us nowhere. We were lucky enough to enlist François Reumont as director of photography – an experienced TV professional, he had shot a few short films like Zombinladen and Paris by Night of the Living Dead, as well as feature film The Black Door.

Less than two weeks before filming began, Nafees had to drop out due to visa issues (he was a US student living in France), and we had to figure out how to replace him. You would think that the replacement would have been found among the actors we auditioned in June... but in fact, we chose an Icelandic actor called Pétur Sigurðsson, who was recommended by Ewen Blumenstein. He turned out to be great, showing up at the last minute and taking immediately the mantle of his character.

So there we were, twelve people in a house for two weeks, trying to follow a crazy schedule that involved action, special effects... until we realized that the SFX makeup artist had no intention of showing up. After having said that she had prepared and tested everything, she simply stopped returning phone calls. We suddenly had to handle the fact that there was not going to be any on-set special effects in our supernatural/horror film! A heavy rewrite was made on the spot, and I left space for a few SFX shots to be added afterwards. When we got back, we ran a small crowdfunding campaign, and managed to craft a cool gory shot with the people who had made the monster eye for the 'Frankenstein' teaser. After having drawn a few FX scenes and concept sketches that never made it to the screen, Lucie finally storyboarded a new one that we were able to put in the can.


2014

Post-production on House of VHS has been forever, it seems. We are now in the second half of 2014, and it's not yet 100% completed. But we're almost there, thanks to all the people who joined and supported the project. It was not an easy one, but if we can survive this kind of hardcore filmmaking and turn over a satisfying movie, it should be no problem to handle Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein with a decent budget.

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.

2009: Zorro vs Sherlock Holmes

While filming the last William Boquet, two major things happened: I moved in with the woman whom I would eventually marry, and I decided to write a new ambitious script about two iconic characters. Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein? Nope, I wasn't there yet. The initial project was Zorro vs Sherlock Holmes.

I've always been fond of time-defying characters: Robin Hood, Dracula, the Three Musketeers... And Zorro of course. Before I even thought of being a writer-director, I wanted to be an actor. To play Zorro. And before that, I wanted to be Zorro himself. So the concept of having him and Holmes meet and fight seemed exciting. Both swordsmen, one of them cultivating mysteries, the other solving them. Of course the timeframe wouldn't allow Sherlock Holmes to meet Don Diego de la Vega in his prime, but he could easily meet his grandson – which was the setup for this script.

Holmes and Watson, in their early years (not long after A Study a Scarlet), travel to California in order to unmask a dangerous criminal who calls himself Zorro. Of course, they eventually find out that he's fighting the good fight, against a corrupt local government. Together, they retrieve a treasure that had been unfairly confiscated from the Indian people, and they bring down the evil military in an epic final swordfight. Or something like that. I was really excited about this project. I had re-read the whole Sherlock Holmes Canon, as well as Johnston McCulley's original Zorro novel. I had spent hours watching films about both characters, in order to sort out what made them interesting.

But despite having a beginning and an end, the story was hard to put together. Why would the evil military call Sherlock Holmes to help them? Why would Zorro need him to overpower the bad guys? How could the viewer be excited by Holmes unmasking Zorro, when his identity would already be known to him? And if we hide it from him, by having several “potential Zorros”, then how will the viewer care for this character? And most of all: how is there going to be a foe charismatic enough to stand in front of two legends? 

John Neville as Holmes

A lot of those questions derived from the fact that Holmes and Zorro are both positive characters, who can't really be opposed unless one of them loses the audience's sympathy. It's like having a movie called Batman vs Superman (oh wait!), you know that they will eventually join forces. So unless you have a great villain, someone that the viewer already knows, it kind of falls flat because your heroes won't be fighting a big threat. I didn't want to bring Moriarty into the plot, it was against my rules – which rules, you might ask? Watching and reading non-canonical Holmes stories, I have observed that most of them (if not all!) featured one or more of the following characters: Irene Adler, Mycroft Holmes and/or Professor Moriarty. I ended up finding it very annoying, since these characters are only featured once or twice over the course of 60 stories written by Conan Doyle. Hell, Moriarty is often believed to be Sherlock's recurring nemesis, when he's only the main antagonist in one short story (and one that seems to have been hastily written by Conan Doyle in order to kill off his detective). Watson doesn't even get to meet him in person! As for Irene Adler, a lot of versions want us to believe that Holmes and her have been romantically involved, to the point where they're sometimes supposed to have a child together. But in A Scandal in Bohemia, Watson clearly states: “It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind.” In fact, several stories have Holmes fall in love, with Adler or someone else, when that goes against all 60 canonical adventures! Bottom line is: I decided that if I was to write a Sherlock Holmes story, I wouldn't use Irene Adler, Mycroft or Moriarty.

While I was struggling with the plot, looking for a way to make it worthwhile (without letting Holmes or Zorro become the other's supporting character), I stumbled upon the information that Zorro wasn't public domain property. It belonged to the Zorro Estate, who probably wouldn't allow the character to be used in a crossover with another hero. In the 60s, Zorro had been confronted to Maciste, the Three Musketeers, and even naked women in a few soft-porn movies, but the copyright-holders had straightened the line in the 90s with “mainstream” productions such as the Antonio Banderas movies, the book by Isabel Allende or the recent musical show. So here I was, stuck with a story that didn't quite work and a character that possibly could be an obstacle to making the film even if I sorted out the plot. So I started toying around with the idea of replacing him with another mysterious avenger, probably the Scarlet Pimpernel – which would have moved the plot to France.

But one day, lightning struck. It was the end of February, 2010. I was sitting in a movie theater, in front of a French comedy that didn't have my full attention. Suddenly, I thought of Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein. It didn't have anything to do with what I was watching. It was just a title that popped up. During the last 30 minutes of the screening, the main elements of the script came together in my head. When the credits hit the screen, I left the theater (which I usually don't do, I like to stay until the very end – even for movies I don't like!) and rushed home, where my 6-month pregnant wife saw me go straight to my desk, take a pen and paper, and write down the outline for this new script. It all felt so obvious, that I couldn't understand why it hadn't occurred to me earlier: Sherlock Holmes and Watson would travel to Germany, not California or France. And they would have to unmask a mad scientist, one who would have created a giant monster. It made perfect sense: Holmes was the hero, the monster was a menace and the identity of the mad scientist was the mystery to solve. Now I knew the direction I was headed. I just didn't realize how long the journey would be.