My fourth full-length feature 35mm and colour and scope, things are starting to get serious.
After the violence and the media suicide of ASSASSIN(S), I sought new horizons. My curiosity for American cinema and a desire to know the secrets of its machinations, gave me the opportunity of going to Los Angeles for two years.
I developed a script there, learned a lot about Hollywood and its mysteries, and participated in lots of projects that never saw the light of day, to the point of even envisioning (for about 2 seconds) making a Steven SEAGAL or a Van DAMME …
In two years I learned a great deal about the Hollywood Machine, which would serve me in the following years.
I came back to France without any really concrete projects, but in the same week, Alain GOLDMAN (producer at the age of 25 for “1492” by Ridley Scott no less) sent me a novel by J.C Grangé. I devoured the 500-page book in a night and shivered like I do when I read a good Stephen KING.
I leaped into the adventure with the goal of discovering a new cinema, a cinema I’d never approached, that was less personal but more visual, with the spectator’s pleasure as my target. Raw, unadorned cinema.
It was a difficult shoot technically and physically because this genre of film being non-existent in the French landscape at the time, we had to try out a lot of new technology. We brought a crane onto a glacier, flipped a Ratrack (snow tractor) on hydraulic jacks, lowered Jean RENO and Nadia FARES down an ice fault, broke Vincent CASSEL’s nose during a fight scene… In short, it was an “extraordinary” experience that helped me to understand a little better how to make this kind of cinematographic monster.
A film like this would have cost a minimum of 50M$ in Hollywood, but we did it for 14… Which I’m really proud of. |
