French Frights: BlackAria
Never heard of this French giallo with its awesome retrowave soundtrack made by Double Dragon?
François Gaillard must have been around twelve when he picked up this issue of L’heure des Sorcières. It was the raging 80s, here, in France. Meaning a lot of comic books anthologies such as this were released every week in newspaper kiosks. I didn’t know about this particular one until I started writing this, but I can fathom this type of publication. A brightly coloured cover, black and whites interior mostly. Might have been a few movie reviews, files about some obscure author’s life. But this was not what caught the teen’s eyes. In the issue he’d just purchased, laid this two page comic strip, it was pretty simple: A woman shatters a crystal ball and turns it into sunglasses to witness her future. I never read this book, but I can assure you, this doesn’t prevent her from meeting some gruesome end.
François Gaillard lived in the south of France, would eventually grow up to become a nightwatcher, not a filmmaker. Through adulthood, he would use his funds to build an association named Schools Out. This is pretty common here as making movies can be difficult, people will organize in association so as to be able to, let’s say, contract insurance, to form some sort of legal entity.
Gaillard says he made a movie named Witching Hour in 2003 and sold it to Redemption Film. I don’t know much more about this, other than this extract I dug up online. Witching Hour would be the translation of L’heure des Sorcières. When I told you, the comic book never really left him.
From then on, the association would make a bunch of short films. With everyone taking different roles in different productions. Some became boom operators, others cameramen, etc. Slowly growing a library of films, of experiences. It’s said that Anna Naigeon once helped them on their short project by bringing them some projectors and Lee Filters. This was how she got hired as a Director of Photography later on. See, Anna was already in the movie business, she decided to help the little team just for fun, and I get that I once shot a slasher with a tiny association solely because I love slasher, it was tough but it was fun.
What wasn’t fun seemed to be the shooting of a short film called Blind Snow. The first version of BlackAria really. In it, the lead was taken by Aurélie Godefroy who would go on to become the killer in the final product. From his own admission, Gaillard was never good at talking to actors. A flaw I’ve witnessed in a lot of aspiring filmmakers. Dude who watched a bunch of movies in their childhood, wants to recreate them but lacks the social skills, or worse, sometimes does not get that actors aren’t just props but human beings with real feelings. Blind Snow was, according to his own words, his worst shooting. Imagine dreaming about making a giallo about a woman making sunglasses out of a crystal ball and it being shattered as you enter the editing room.
I cannot fathom the strength one needs to get over such a big disappointment.
Anna and Gaillard had first worked together on a movie All murder, all guts and all fun. The filmmaker wanted to make a trilogy of giallos about women witnessing events that led to their death. At the same time, he also thought of Blind Snow as a part of a trilogy. This one entitled 3 Hits from Hell. All would be shot in DVD because of budget contraints. It was to be some sort of grindhouse anthology of short films he could try and sell to distributors. All of this certainly must have played a part in him wanting to resurrect the Blind Snow project.
On his previous effort, Gaillard had encountered Clara Valet. She came from an opera background, had some acting skills. Problem was she was a minor during the shooting of All murder, so Gaillard didn’t want her as a lead, in fear something might happen, not wanting to be responsible if her parents decided to pursue legal action. Still, Gaillard still a brief scene in his short in which a pretty woman had to sleep with a snake on her stomach. Clara was the only one who accepted and Gaillard instantly thought: This girl has balls, man, I need to work with her in the future.
Future came in the form of BlackAria. The redo of Blind Snow, Clara was now eighteen, of legal age in France. And Gaillard had so many problems with actresses in his previous efforts, he did two things. First was to ask Christophe Robin to be co-director, to be the one responsible for the direction of actors. I already talked about how a lot of filmmakers prefer this, when they’re not really able to communicate accurately with their team. So I totally get this.
The second was asking for his own DOP to appear as one of the (very naked) victims in the movie. What’s interesting is that Anna accepted. In an interview present on the DVD, the lead technician states that as a horror film fan, this was her way of repaying the naked ladies she’d liked to see running helplessly in horror movies.
BlackAria would be shot across 30 days. Fifteen between March and April of 2008. The remaining fifteen were distributed across weekends throughout the year until October. This long post-production phase would be the reason the movie would eventually turn from a short to a full-length feature. Through editing, David Scherer, who with Anna was the sole professional on set, SFX designer, told the filmmakers they should turn the damn thing into a whole movie for it would make the piece easier to sell.
This pushed Gaillard to write two more scenes — the one with the drunken girls as well as the flashback — in order to make the movie a suitable length. Obviously, this also led to complications for a few scenes, Anna the DOP wasn’t present for at least two sequences, and somebody else had to take reins. There was also an instance when Christophe couldn’t make it on set, and Gaillard readily admits he wasn’t able to get the right interpretation out of Clara because of this.
Despite all of this, the abandoned short film had finally blossomed into a movie. Maybe the first movie of Gaillard’s that was actually well received. It enabled the team to tour a few festivals in France. Got them a distribution deal in DVD, thanks to le Chat qui Fume, a distribution company who went on to help them make their next movie Last Caress. This next production would feature the exact same team.
If you sat there, and still wonder why BlackAria was named like a Glenn Danzig’s song, there exists no reason at all. In an interview I witnessed Gaillard claiming he simply gave to his movies title of things or songs he liked.
Still, I hope you take out of this, some night watchman once decided to make a movie, funded an association, failed a bunch of times, scrapped a project he had shot before he turned it into a real movie.
And that’s always a nice story.
Next week, we’ll talk about Thirst and Thérèse Raquin and innovation in France. And, yup, JP, this time it’s true for the paper has already been written.
