French Frights: Eden Log
By: Basile Lebret
Tags: Movies, Horror, History, France, Science Fiction

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.

The US trailer for Eden Log

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.