French Frights: Pitoff’s Vidocq
Vidocq was the first film to have been shot digitally in France. What’s more? It led to Halle Berry’s Catwoman.
In the late 90s, producers were starting to remake of old series such as The Fugitive or Wild Wild West. This fashion wasn’t only an American thing. In France, production companies tried to remake famous tv shows such as Belphegor. It was in the Zeitgeist. Hence why Dominique Farrugia and Olivier Granier once approached Jean-Christophe Grangé who was making a name for himself writing thriller novels at the time. They might have heard that the writer was currently developing one of his novels The Crimson Rivers with Matthieu Kassovitz, we’ll never know. What we do know is that they asked Grangé to write a screenplay about Vidocq. This would be his first original script but the duo of producers had few restrictions except that it had to be about Vidocq. Main problem was, they wanted to ride on the success of those old tv show remakes but they had not any rights to adapt the ancient series. Grangé knew what he had to do. First was to research about Vidocq.
Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857) was a felon who became head of national security in France during the eighteenth century. Son of a baker, he was thrown in jail for the first time at sixteen, enrolled in the army and survived two battles before being fired from it. He then turned to being a conman, following the army around while pretending to be a soldier in order to get food from inhabitants before being finally imprisoned. For eight years. Vidocq tried to escape, two times, didn’t succeed and when he finally got released, he became a rat. Knowing the bowels and the machination in the underground world helped him put a lot of people behind bars. Soon he had his own office, was able to recruit his own men (mostly ex-felons such as him). The man became a legend and a nuisance, going as far as finding false nobles, people who had profited of France’s troubled times, during the Revoliton, to construct fake lives and credencies. Vidocq had power, and an ex-felon with power didn’t please the police one bit. This is why they raided him, he finally quit his job and founded the first agency of private eyes in the whole world. But even as a detective, Vidocq found way to overshadow the French police. It’s also around this time like, as many cowboy legends would soon do, Vidocq turned towards ghost-writers and began to recount his memories. In this manner, he ensured that his legacy would be engraved in marble. He became head of Police once again when troubles arose which could lead to a new Revolution and spent the end of his life joking with famous author such as Hervé Balzac or Alexandre Dumas. Just as a mention, it’s no doubt he inspired Dupin’s Poe and the American writer even acknowledges Vidocq in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poe influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the whole saga finally got us a famous man named Sherlock Holmes.
As a side note, Poe didn’t invent true crime story with the Murder of Mary Rogêt in 1842, Vidocq’s pal Alexander Dumas published a book three years prior named Famous Crimes which is solely comprised of true crime stories but I diverge.
It’s easy to see why Vidocq grasped France’s pop culture with such a firm grip, easy to know why tv shows were made about him and why it might appear appealing to make a movie about such a character.
Grangé’s first idea was that he wanted a villain with a mirror in place of his face. This was his first epiphany, still he thought this would cost too much but the producers just loved the concept. The other thing he wanted to do was to begin the movie with Vidocq’s death, this proved much harder to swallow for the investor. Kill the eponymous character? As soon as the movie began? Grangé said this was a pretty common process, kill a character at the beginning and then work through flashbacks to explain what happened, with its most famous example being Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane. Soon the story evolved into a fully grown genre movies. One in which a young man from the country comes to Paris to talk with Vidocq of the biography he’s written for him onlyto discover the famous inspector is dead. The writer then decides to solves his hero’s murder if not only for the fact that it would make a great ending to his book but this path leads him to discover of a monster which haunts the dark streets of eighteenth-century Paris.
Despite all of this, in an interview present on the DVD, you can clearly hear Grangé stating he would never write another original screenplay again. Not that the experience was a bad one but it took him one year to write the first draft and then Pitof came on board and rewrites continued for another year. Grangé who still is a successful writer goes on to explain that two years was what it usually took him to write entire novels. Still, looking back today, we know he lied for twenty years later he would write a tv show based on his books The Crimson Rivers but this is another topic.
Pitof at the time was working head of SFX department in advertisement, television and movies. Still, he was searching a way to make his first movie. You see, Pitof was friend with both Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he had just finished working on Alien: Resurrection, the movie which split the duo. Pitof was director of second unit on this sequel, this American experience taught him he could handle a movie set. Going back to France, Pitof hoped he would be able to make a film about planes.
Pitof whose real name is Jean-Christophe Colmar had always been called this nickname for it is a contraption of petit meaning small and Christophe, hence why he chose it as a pseudonym when he entered the film industry. Around 1999, the head of SFX was on the set of Dominique Farrugia’s Influence Peddling when the director/producer handed him a draft of the script, wondering what his head of department would have to say about it. When Pitof noticed it was about Vidocq he instantly babbled that the French inspector was a hero of his and that it would definitely be the type of movie he would like to direct. Two weeks later, Dominique Farrugia hired him and the rewrites began. Since Pitof did not know about Grangé, they also gave him a copy of the Crimson Rivers because the preproduction of the Kassovitz’s movie was taking place and everybody knew it would be huge.
It appears, in the first draft of the script, two investigations were taking place, one was led by the journalist while the other one rested upon the shoulders of surviving victims. Pitof thought this might lose some spectators and asked Grangé to simplify a bit. Also, in those really early draft, the masked killer didn’t kill virgin, he would kill children. A horrible fact which lend a certain fairy tale quality to the story, according to Pitof, but was put down by the producers because of the whole Dutroux affair. At this point in time, tv and newspaper were filled to the brim with Marc Dutroux, a paedophile who kept children in a hidden compartment of his home and the war between police force which resulted in the death of two children. What’s interesting is that in the finished movie, when three rich men goes into poor neighbourhoods to buy virgins, they can still be seen harbouring fantastic looking garments and clothes for it was intended as a way to ease children into trusting them, giving a surreal quality to the whole sequence.
According to Pitof, he never thought of anyone else than Guillaume Canet to play the part of the countryside journalist but the story behind Gerard Depardieu’s involvement is way more interesting. See, at this point in time, two production companies were competing with each other on who would be the first to adapt Vidocq. One owned the rights to the tv show AND Gérard Depardieu was attached to the project while the other was trying to make its own thing and had casted Daniel Auteuil in the role of Vidocq. This is until scheduling conflicts arose because Farrugia’s production was postponed and Auteuil had to leave. We may never know why the other production fell through but what we do know is that Depardieu himself contacted Farrugia asking to play Vidocq. Sure, Pitof was impressed, he had always been second unit director, he mostly directed puppets and stuntpersons but this was too good an opportunity to pass on. Pitof was scared but this precise production was beginning to look great.
You see, for the artistic direction, Pitof hired Marc Caro, yeah, the dude who directed City of Lost Children and Delicatessen with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Yeah, I already wrote about him and yeah, he seems to be involved in quite a LOT a good projects in genre movies in France but I’m discovering it as I go along folks. Problem is Marc Caro also had some scheduling conflicts, so the D.A befell upon Jean Rabasse, still pretty much as Jeunet did with Alien: Resurrection, Pitof asked Caro to cast him people with faces as we say in France, a particularity of Caro’s work. What’s funny is this, though, listening to the audio commentary, you can hear Rabasse and Pitof discovering they met Caro on the same videoclip for Indochine in 1985.
One thing that was decided in preproduction by Pitof, after having done some test, was to shoot solely on digital. Nowadays this is the norm but Vidocq would go on to become the first movie shot digitally in France. An exception advertising would play a lot upon. With an artistic direction centred upon the paintings of Gustave Moreau and a budget of around 20 million euros, shooting began in the Invalides in Paris and lasted between May and July 2000. It also went on in Bordeaux, Coulomiers, Chantilly, Pommeuse, Pontoise. Production was all over the place, still watching the making of, despite a filmmaker being — kind of — a beginner it appears to have went smoothly.
At the beginning of the production, Pitof, having a past in lead SFX, decided to have all the post-production going on in the same building and not be given to some work-for-hire companies. It was a process he’d witnessed on Alien: Resurrection and which appeared, to him, to ease the task. So, the producers rented a building, contracting only Mac Guff — yeah, the world renown studio who would go on to create Despicable me and the Minions — in order to animate the mirror mask of the Alchemist. Post production took 9 months. According to the bonus on the DVD, both the alleyway where they shot in Bordeaux and the place they rented to edit the movie have been disfigured but this is how time passes.
Movie got released, didn’t really make his money back even though I distinctly recall seeing it in a theatre full, and I remember all the promotion and the advertising surrounding it. Still, Vidocq is worth being watched, and its genesis pretty much as in most movies will tell you that nobody makes a movie alone, dig a bit and you’ll soon find a whole team of players, both talented and dedicated. I mean, this movie led Pitof to go to the US, direct a version of Catwoman no one remembers where she was black and nobody bated an eye about supposed ethnicity change or anything because it was the beginning of the millennium and culture war didn’t exist. But hey, Vidocq’s shall be seen and Catwoman killed Pitof’s career right of the bat. Afterwards,the director would only direct Fire & Ice before havind to fall back on producing movies. Weird career, uh?
If you got here, now that next week we’ll talk about Yukio Mishima’s Yukoku!
