French Frights: Pitoff’s Vidocq
By: Basile Lebret
Tags: History, Movies, Culture, Horror, France

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.