French Frights: The making of Goal of the Dead
Ever heard of Goal of the Dead? A French zombie-flick involving soccer players. This is the story behind this project.
In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez joined forces to create Grindhouse, a real cinematic experience aiming at recreating the ambiance of grindhouse theatres as they existed in the 70s. For this, Tarantino shot Deathproof, an homage to slasher film, while Robert Rodriguez produced a zombie flick Planet Terror. They went as far as asking to filmmakers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright to shoot fake trailers for fake grindhouse movies. And this is how Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun were born. Except for those two films, let’s just say the whole Grindhouse thing didn’t go so well, at least commercially on US soil, in the rest of the world the two movies were shown separately, meaning that people in France would never live through the real Grindhouse experience. At least until 2014…
2014, in France, saw the release of Goal of the Dead, a two-part movie, each segment an hour-and-something long. The pitch? Samuel Lorit, a soon-to-be-retired soccer player for the Olympique de Paris has to play against the team of his hometown Capelongue, which is tough enough, but when vomiting zombies take hold of the field everything goes south. Of course, the movie has a lot more to tell, about Capelongue — the small village in which the action takes place — about soccer, hooliganism, celebrity and everything in between. Goal of the dead is a small comedy only aimed at humouring a crowd of both soccer and horror fans. Still, a lot has to be taken into account when talking about this project. First, it was always aimed at being some kind of Grindhouse project, it only released in selected theatres for one séance per evening, always presented by one of the filmmakers because each part of the adventure had a different director. The first part was directed by Benjamin Rocher which horror fans might recognize as the filmmaker behind The Horde — a 2009 French zombie flick — the second part was made by Thierry Poiraud who would go on to become the mastermind behind the Dark Spot tv series currently streaming on Netflix.
For those familiar with Adam Green’s work, the idea of a soccer team being confronted by zombies may seem familiar. It is the plot of Chimpaze, the movie both Adam Green and Joe Lynch’s characters want to make, in the Holliston tv series, created by Green himself and truth is, the Hatchet filmmaker once acknowledged the fact on his Movie Crypt podcast. Mainly because the Holliston tv series aired from 2012 to 2013 and Goal of the Dead was released in 2014. Much like Koushun Takami talking about Hunger Games, Green shrugged this off as “I don’t know, man, I can’t prove they would have heard of this series but hey, who knows…”. And, sure, this two-years gap might seem strange at first. That’s until you know the whole story.
Goal of the Dead wasn’t born in 2012 or anywhere close, if we’re to listen to producer Raphaël Rocher — yup, the producer of Goal of the Dead is Benjamin Rocher’s brother — the idea of having a soccer team fight off a bunch of zombies originated in 2010 and it wasn’t inspired by Adam Green’s work but by another industry colleague, Charlie Brooker, the mastermind behind Black Mirror². Before he created his anthology about the nightmares of technology, Brooker wrote the Dead Set, a 3-part mini-series in which the participants of Big Brother have to fight off a zombie invasion which happened when they were stuck inside of the house, cut from the world. This according to Raphaël is what led him to contact Nicolas Peufaillit the screenwriter behind A Prophet, who had already worked on The Horde as a scenario consultant.
At this time, the producer, inspired by Brooker’s work, wanted a tv series, a 10x20 minutes to be precise he could sell to a network while arguing such a thing had been successful in the United-Kingdom. Peufaillit, knowing his craft, told him if they wanted to make a really good tv series, they needed to bring in a bunch of screenwriters from different backgrounds to work on the project, thinking the series would appeal to more network if it was done this way. This is why, if you decided to look up Goal of the Dead right now on IMDB, you would see so many names behind the writing credits. Tristan Schulmann, the screenwriter behind the adaptation of the first part, even said : “Raphaël decided to put a ginger, a black man, an Asian male and a girl into a room and told them to come up with ideas for a tv show about a soccer team having to fight a bunch of zombies.
Looking back at both movies, you would be amazed at how much it makes sense that this was a tv series beforehand. Every character seems to have a backstory, a character arc whatever his importance may be, from the hero to the group of redneck hooligans, everyone seems a full fleshed-out character. Still, the project was refused by every channel that exist under the French sun, even though Canal+, France’s most successful private channel, appeared interested they didn’t want to put any money into such venture. Goal of the Dead was stuck in development hell.
Well, to be honest, Canal + was interested in the project, they just didn’t want it to be a tv series, maybe thinking investing enough to produce three hours of content was too much of a risk. So, Capture the Flag, Raphaël Rocher’s production company, had a lot of work already done, which they found was unexploitable. If they wanted to do something about it, they may have to make it a movie. Enter Benjamin Rocher, who knew both Schulman and Peufaillit, and was still Raphaël’s brother, who wanted things to change in the way films are distributed in France. If Goal of the Dead had been thought through as an episodic format why couldn’t they make it TWO movies, one for each half of a soccer match and do as Tarantino once done? Screen it as some sort of Grindhouse special, showing the two halves in one séance, with an entr’acte and the presence of the crew members. Producing two movies at the same time would also help secure funds from the CNC, a state-funded organisation which helps movies get made in France. But who would do the second half? Who would be interested in such a project?
Well, Thierry Poiraud for sure! Much like his partner in crime for Goal of the Dead, Poiraud once shot a full-length feature in duo. With his own brother, they made the very obscure The Return of James Battle which wasn’t well received. Benjamin Rocher’s first film The Horde was made with the help of Yannick Dahan. So, both filmmakers had an experience of shooting with someone else, which is not that rare in France but still most duo tends to stay with one another, much like Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (Inside, Leatherface) or Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Amer, Let the Corpses Tan). Here were two filmmakers who would gladly collaborate with one another, with Benjamin Rocher stating it was kind of a dream to work with Thierry Poiraud. And, being born in the 90s in France, I can understand why. While his first film wasn’t a success, Poiraud and his brother, at the time calling themselves the United Blaireaux (meaning the United Badgers), had created one the most iconic piece of advertisement for Orangina, using the horror film tropes, they created this chainsaw-wielding, always-yelling slasher played by Maurice Lamy (Delicatessen) whose cry : PARCE QUE! — BECAUSE! In English — would go on to become a pop culture icon at the time.
Since Capture the Flag now had both filmmakers, all they needed to do was to cut on the length of material available to them. In other words, they had to transform three hours of content into two hours of it. And so they did. Benjamin Rocher asked for Thomas Schulman⁶, who was on the original writing team, to adapt his first half, while Thierry Poiraud asked Marie Garel-Weiss with whom he would go on to create Don’t Grow Up⁵, his next feature. With this done, they cast everybody together with one simple goal, if they both agreed on an actor, it surely meant he or she was the perfect fit for the role. This is how they cast Alban Lenoir, who admitted during his casting that he didn’t play soccer for at least ten years and Tiphaine Daviot who had not done Marianne, Dark Stories or Girl with Balls at the time.
They had eight weeks to shoot both movies, and a total budget of 3,4 millions euros and were planning to shoot in March of 2013, in a town of the Parisian suburbs called La Courneuve. Tiphaine Daviot said in an interview that Rocher was really precise in everything he wanted, while working with Thierry Poiraud was waiting for him to laugh behind his combo to be sure the scene was any good. Even with two filmmakers at the helm, the movie road on. Sill, according to the making of, the shooting was rough, mostly because they didn’t have as much time they thought they needed to pull it off, but when on the 13th of march 2013 snow began to fall, the production was definitely beaten. 10 cm (3.9 inches) fell in half an hour; meaning the crew lost a whole day of rush this night. Still, by shooting some interiors and switching the filmmakers behind some scenes, the film was able to progress. Fun fact: I was on the set of Goal of the Dead for a night. I played some zombie hooligans when, in the second half, all the infected are running back towards the football field. This night, I wasn’t paid but I was young and studying and happy to be on a horror movie. Watching the making of right now, when I hear Raphaël Rocher saying they had to give up on a hundred and fifty extras because of the snow, I think I was the replacement. A bunch of horror fan kids who got to spend the night playing zombies on some obscure French horror flick. Still, the movie got made, even if it was the producer’s worst shooting since ever. And in a way it’s all that matters.
The release was, well, let’s just say the film got released. From the start Capture the Flag and Benjamin Rocher thought of Goal of the Dead as some big show. Doing one evening per week in different cinemas. At this time, Luminor, the distributor didn’t possess its own cinema (since then it has acquired a cinema called Le Nouveau Latina which has been renamed Luminor Hotel de Ville) and so they made a deal with the 3 Luxembourg, a small theatre in near the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, to show the movie each night with the filmmakers and some crew members as part of the attendance. According to Capture the Flag, it worked. They even went as far as screening it in different theatres all across France, much like Darren Lynn Bousman did with his comedy The Devil’s Carnival back in 2012. Through Rocher’s own admission he seemed to like the whole process, even if he states many times that they were the first to do so, which isn’t entirely true. As stated during the beginning of this piece, at some point in a recent past, Tarantino had this idea, even if the Rocher’s brother then built up upon its foundation, I still find it dubious that they never heard of Bousman’s musical distribution scheme and the way he screened it by himself while touring America because he was afraid of piracy? Still I have to remind myself that even for different motives people can came up with similar schemes.
Today, I don’t think people really remember Goal of the Dead, it had a discreet DVD release but we all saw the decline in this physical medium… Even with all of this, the soccer movie flick which was shot by two really different filmmakers seems important in the French horror history. Maybe because Thierry Poiraud went on to develop Don’t Grow Up with Marie Garel-Weiss, and he asked both Tiphaine Daviot and Renaud Rutten to join him on the Dark Spot tv series he co-created with Matthieu Missoffe. Benjamin Rocher went on to direct Anti-Gang which starred Alban Lenoir before being the second equip director on the Netflix-produced Marianne tv series, created by Samuel Bodin. Producing Goal of the Dead, and meeting Alban Lenoir, may have been what led Raphaël Rocher to produce the last season of Lazy Company, a tv series whom Lenoir was the star of, along with Alexander Phillip and Benoît Moret who also starred in Goal of the Dead. This series, telling the tale of a bunch of misfit soldiers during World War 2 had been created by Samuel Bodin. Bodin and Raphaël Rocher would then go on to create T.A.N.K a tv series in which Alban Lenoir plays an escaped convict which also stars Renaud Rutten. And Benjmain Rocher would go on to be second unit director on Marianne, the last Samuel Bodin’s endeavour at the time of writing this. Full circle.
This goes on to prove that, even with all its flaws, this kind of risky project that was Goal of the Dead may have been a short worth taking. For the movie it gave us, and everything which came hereafter.
Next week we’ll talk about Train to Busan so stay tuned!
French Fright is a series I release on the second friday of every month. If you liked this piece you may want to read about Christian Volckman’s Renaissance or Marc Caro’s Dante 01.
