French Frights: Eden Log
Eden Log is French scifi movie released in 2007, in fact it may very well be the very best scifi film you’ve never seen.
Okay, I’m gonna be truthful on this one. When I was a teenager — a f-ing lifetime ago — I really DID love Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!, the architectures, the lack of a plot, this whole universe where no empty spaces really existed, a whole world where, just as in my dreams, the sky had disappeared, replaced by a ceiling. That and Tsutomu Nihei used to be Tsutomu Takahashi’s assitant. Still, this single art piece fed my daydreaming and my creations for the longest time. Meaning, when around 2005 or 2006, I read a blurb about an upcoming French scifi flick which had almost the same plot : Unknown dude wakes up in an environment he can’t comprehend and climb his way up to freedom, I was instantly hyped. And that’s a rare thing. This was fifteen years ago, though, and I guess a lot of people forgot about this flick, I mean most people may never have heard of the damned thing. So, let me tell you about the time, a REALLY famous French actor got a storyboarder pal of his to make the movie of his dream.
Once upon a time, there existed a man called Franck Vestiel who was a storyboarder. Tired of working in an office, he decided to go on and become a first assistant director. But you see, Vestiel’s main characteristic was that he was humble, as in a Kendrick Lamar’s song. You have to understand that the young AD deeply believed he didn’t have what it took to make it as a filmmaker. In his eyes, directors were superstars, artisst hovering above the lesser beings that we all are, this logic included himself. In a way, his lack of an ego paralyzed him.
Now, I don’t know if you’re like me. I mean, I’m French and I grew up during the 90s, meaning I had to go to bed quite early while my parents stayed up late to watch the teevo, crime series and all because this was mostly what inhabited the French wavelength at the time. One of those famous series on national television was called Central Nuit and it featured an actor, a man who would become so famous, he would go on to play Asterix in like two movies. His name was Clovis Cornillac and this precise police tv show was his very first big break.
It’s on this precise series that Cornillac met Vestiel. History would not tell us how but let’s just say they hit it off. I’ve heard Cornillac in interview stating that Vestiel is just a very pleasant and smart guy, that his silent, intelligent type of character is what led them towards one another. We may never know, maybe Cornillac just like this first AD way more than he liked the directors of every episode. What we do know is that Cornillac really, deeply believed that Vestiel had to become a filmmaker.
In a way, Clovis Cornillac found a way to make Franck Vestiel deliver one project. At some point during the negotiations to make a second season of Central Nuit, he stated to the production company that he could not make it into the next season, that the only reason he would sign a new contract, would be if the producers let Franck Vestiel direct at least three episodes. This worked, and if you search the internet enough, you may find interviews of Clovis Cornillac stating that he knew he was lying and could never give the production team the 35 days of shooting they needed, Clovis could only offer them 4–5 days top because of his new-found movie schedule, but at least his bluff put Franck Vestiel on the map.
Still, we do know that Cornillac never wanted Vestiel to only direct a tv show, he wanted the dude who had become hisfriend after having worked closely for a season, to really direct the movie of his dreams. And Vestiel had dreams. Truth is, as most people of his generation he really did like the whole Métal Hurlant vibe, it was a French comic book magazine which kind of changed the way we approached comic book worldwide. I mean, Métal Hurlant gave us Blade Runner and Alien, in a way, this is how important Métal Hurlant was. But Vestiel, being a spiritual person — according to Cornillac, he’s a protestant — wanted more. The rise of Pierre Bordage, whom I talked in my piece on Marc Caro’s Dante 01, may have played a part in this. Jodorowsky, Bordage those are important people who sort of turned the whole French sci-fi towards a more spiritual approach.
You see, if Franck Vestiel had learned one thing throughout his career as an A.D, it was that people tend to become wiser after their first film. To him, directing his first feature would mean he had to inject as much of himself as possible into the project. Because, to Vestiel, it appeared certain that every first film had to be a failure, meaning there are no real risks in doing what you want, people will follow you anyway. On the opposite, after having helped you through some tough times during your first production, technicians tend to become less lenient on your second movie, because this one has to be better than their first experience supporting you throughout everything.
Being a gaffer, I can attest that this is partly true. The French system almost certainly means that you will not see your money get back, in fact, the whole system is here to help you through this. And on a more personal note, I can safely say that I helped aspiring filmmaker on tough projects if it was their first time,still after any one of those, I also tended to want a little bit more. Meaning, I could give you a week of my time free of charge to check and see if you’ve got any talent. I may accept to not make that much money on your first film, but if you call me to do a second one, you better pay me fairly.
If you search long enough you may stumble upon Franck Vestiel stating that the whole movie came from just one image. A black and white frame of an eye opening. In another interview, I have also seen Vestiel saying that he wrote the whole film with Clovis Cornillac in mind, that he knew the actor so intimately, that he knew just what he could do. Truth is, we may never know how Vestiel wrote the piece, what we do know is that he wrote it under the supervision of Pierre Bordage. This, for those who knows Bordage’s work is kind of obvious, watching Eden Log nowadays, you can almost pinpoint what makes a Pierre Bordage fiction within it. You could even compare it Dante 01 to see how much it fits. In Vestiel’s movie, a young man finds himself in a disturbing and hostile environment, his whole quest revolves around the idea of knowing where he fits in the whole picture, along the way he meets a female character which will help him for a bit before being thrown into trouble and our hero has to save the damsel in distress. Those are Bordage’s clichés to which we would add the rape scene, a scene so frequent in Bordage’s work that he’s often been criticized for it, and the use of medias as a way to make the fiction feel real to the viewers. You see, Pierre Bordage deeply thinks that a good way to sell the story to your reader, is adding false documents and pieces of information, such as encyclopaedias excerpts, songs, diegetic medias which are to be fed to the reader so as to make him never stop believing.
This is not to say Franck Vestiel didn’t put his own spin on everything that’s been said above, that he didn’t digest it. In fact, seeing how many levels the story possesses is quite amazing. Truth is, you could either see Eden Log as a metaphor for the evolution of cinematography, a spiritual quest, an ecological fable or politically-charged scifi flick about immigration. All of those would work. There is alchemy and Freemasonry in Eden Log. Some would even argue, that the movie, in and of itself, is just a metaphor for the creative process, with its character first emerging from a dark matrix before wandering into an adventure. All in all, Eden Log appears to be a lot of things, all those being crammed in a single project by a director who, at the time, was pretty damn sure he would not be able to talk about any of it afterwards.
To Franck Vestiel, Eden Log was to be his only shot.
At the time, Clovis Cornillac had met Cedric Jimenez, a young film producer, on the set of Scorpion, an action movie directed by Julien Seri, who had previously worked on Yamakasi. Cornillac introduced Vestiel to the young producer and, it appears Jimenez thought that Eden Log’s complexity, its hermeticism would be key to making it accepted by a worldwide audience. In the producer’s eyes, if you were not able to fight the big American scifi films on their grandiose CGI turf, you had to denote yourself via something else. Franck Vestiel profound reflection and symbolism for instance. According to the audio commentary, between Vestiel meeting Jimenez and the final copy of the movie being distributed, only ten months passed.
The shooting lasted for five weeks, mostly taking place in what had once been a mushroom house. Condition were harsh, the set freezing cold. Clovis Cornillac talks about two things when he’s being interviewed on Eden Log. First that he had to crawl through some of the crew members urines, the other thing being that he went into hypothermia shooting the first scene of the film. You see, in the first second of the movie, Clovis Cornillac emerges half naked from a dark pond. The set is so cold, you can actually see smoke rising from his body, and those are not CGI. The other set chosen to shoot the film were a water treatment plant and a mine, which was used for only one scene.
Looking back on it, Franck Vestiel appears to really only have been disappointed by one sequence. The fight scene between Tolbiac, Clovis Cornillac’s character, and the mutant. Watching the making of while knowing this, you can see the scene was hard to put up, what with Vestiel arguing over with his fight choregrapher who would go on to play Lemoine in the Braquo tv series. Still, it’s safe to assume that the film crew were feeling driven to success while shooting if only for the fact that a small teaser of their work had been edited and shown in Cannes and bought in at least ten countries while they were still shooting. The number would go up to eighteen when the movie had been completed. This may have been helped by the fact that Eden Log which should have been called Rezo Zero, a play on word in French between Network and Zero which doesn’t work, like at all, in English, had its title changed to Eden Log instead, the roots of paradise in a digital vocabulary.
There are two things that I distinctly remember about Eden Log’s release. First, I remember the posters. Living in Paris, I could safely say that Eden Log’s promotion materialwere everywhere throughout the subway system. Giant. You could not have taken any Parisian means of transportation in 2007 and not have been made aware of the film release date.
The other thing that I remember is of my best friend watching some stupid talk show on the tv, the kind where actors, pornstars and reality tv participants meet alongside one another while an animator is trying hard to joke around and sometimes humiliate them. I recall Clovis Cornillac being there, to promote Asterix at the Olympics Game at the time. right before he left the throne in which the invited took place to be interviewed, he tried to place a little word on Eden Log, saying something along the line of : I’ve also worked on this small indie scifi film called Eden Log, if it’s shown near you, please go see it. I know, it left an imprint on me at the time, a famous guy like him, trying to squeeze a tiny bit of promotion for a movie nobody cared about on prime-time television. Well, Clovis surely cared about Eden Log, he had co-produced it. And it would not matter in any in the movie’s destiny.
There was a distribution problem is all I can really say. According to Jimenez, the distributor which had acquired the right to the movie, saw one of its associates split right before the release date. This led to Eden Log being shown in France in only four theatres, two of them being in Paris, the other two not even being inbig cities. I’ve watched an interview of Clovis Cornillac stating that, to him, the movie never got released. And it’s kind of true in a sense. There is a lot more chance for people outside France to have seen Eden Log than their French counterpart.
I remember knowing this at the time, in fact, I remember buying two DVDs of the movie on the day of release. My stupid small part in trying to get the film watched. Along the year, I’ve shown it to every girl which dared enter my intimate life and a few colleagues, to all of my friends and to my dad. Eden Log is important to me. It was just natural it would fall on my French Fright list.
As of today, Jimenez has become a big-time producer, here, in France. Clovis Cornillac is still famous and sometimes he now directs, and Franck Vestiel never made another movie.
I would know.
Sometimes your first shot is your only shot. Do like Vestiel, make the most of it.
If you liked this paper, I would like to direct you to other French Frights such as Christian Volckman’s Renaissance or the one about Marc Caro’s Dante 01.
Next Friday, we’ll be talking about Lovecraft Country so stay tuned!
