
writer Dan Franck is also a screenwriter for film and television. Alexandre Brachet is a producer, founder of Upian, a company that specializes in web documentary. Writing modes of narration or dissemination meeting at the crossroads of two worlds destined to unite.
You’re from different generations: one fed to the paper, the other to the Web. Is it possible to reconcile these two modes of writing for television?
Alexandre Brachet Yes, because they complement each other. I started to get interested in Internet bars in 1994 and this meeting with hypertext was a thunderbolt. My intuition when I decided to participate in creative movement on the Internet, has naturally focused on the independent web and political satire. Today, the Web is diverse and I am impressed by what he has become.
I think Dan Franck and television there is room for all creators. I write from the age of 12 … a way for me to pick up girls! Then I wrote all kinds of things for others as negro. Then I met Jean Vautrin, filmmaker and writer, with whom we created Boro, a journalist photojournalist who has allowed us to tell the tumults of the century. This is where John advised me to write for film and television.
One works as a team, one solo …
A. B. Yes. Upian, our production company founded in 1998, is a small structure of eighteen employees. We have a design studio and development allows you to be independent. In fact, we exercise ons two businesses: one is to imagine interfaces for the Web, such as the consolidation of Rue89 or Arte site, the other is to invest in the production of web documentaries for television and cinema? . The webdoc Prison Valley, written by journalists David Dufresne and Philippe Brault, broadcast on Arte and won numerous awards, been fundamental to us. On the Internet, mass media par excellence, we must be very attentive to the content and show how collusion operates bottom-platform use.
D. F. The Web is very interesting because it is both highly creative and criminogenic: it kills the traditional publishing at all levels and also allows different modes of consumption. However, even if the Internet has radically changed my way of documenting me, it did not influence my writing.
The advent of Web television would not have changed the way of writing or changed codes?
D. F. Not quite, because there is a real grammar of television. I love dipping my pen in different inkwells, and I would like to discover this universe that is the Internet, with its collective writing, perhaps richer. But my approach is that of a novelist, so very lonely. I try to defend my point of view, but I have no idea behind it is the producers who offer me. All new modes of expression obviously interest me. I do not use them all, but the Internet is a wasteland and extraordinary modernity. There will capillaries between the two forms of writing.
A. B. These changes evolve slowly. I believe that a user who enters our program has made an effort. Maybe did he do it on purpose, but we need to capture and captivate immediately. Sometimes, he is seduced by the interface or by a film presentation. Or it may, as with Alma, having a shock.
For a long time there has been a craze around the webdoc, but the projects were extremely low. Today, there is a demand for quality. Ing the willingness of each – which is also mine – is to involve as many people come from different worlds. The question remains: how our programs can they emerge from the millions and millions of pages? Internet is a little Wild West …
D. F. I think sooner or later there will be a convergence between our modes of writing, including documentaries. People of the Web will, over time, bring something new. For fiction, it starts a little to get rid of very restrictive rules of television.
In this regard, the series can they be part of a complementary Web-TV?
D. F. Yes, because the series is writing something great, close to the opera of the nineteenth century. Must be taken captive and then apply certain rules public, exposing things with a minimum of words. It is a requirement that is not artistic, but pleased t that of a chess player. We must never forget, if your contacts are there to remind you: the TV still exists because there are people who watch it. I am also currently developing with Flint, a young bo? You production, adaptation of three of my books, Bohemians (Calmann-Levy, 1998), Libertad! (Grasset, 2004) and Midnight (Grasset, 2010). The only requirement of my producers is to make a new product, not a classic documentary with archival interviews, but rather very graphic t?. The idea is of course to do the same for the web.
A. B. I think TV is now ready to accept very different formats. The explosion of the series is linked to the emergence of the Internet. Some of them, particularly harsh and violent, like “The Corner” by David Simon – this UFO in black and white on drugs – are more appropriately on the Internet.
A webdoc is it more cost effective than a traditional documentary?
A. B. Generally, documentary producers do not earn money. Today, Web budgets are comparable to those of conventional documentary Alma co tee a little more than ? 500,000?. The big difference is that there is then no commercial exploitation. Initially I try to find a more budget to sell a project. With webdoc, we are free in terms of formats, but it must still be profitable. Extend to infinity a webdoc is not necessarily the right idea.
Whether fiction or documentary, is it easier to denounce than to tell?
D. F. In books or television dramas that I write, and I said I denounce. I did with Gerard Mordillat in “The Living and the Dead” and the series “Men of the shadow.” Fiction can tell everything to do with the condition of talent!
A. B. Totally agree! “Handling a comfortable French history?”, A series of six times 52 minutes on the Clearstream affair, produced by Christophe Nick, broadcast on France 5 and resume on the Internet, was a political pad on the Web. Seeing the whole series and diving into the web experience, we understand the whole story! But it must be told, it is especially necessary to tell. This is the question of pedagogy.
What are you working on now?
A. B. I prepare with a Phillippe Brault webdoc around the “Game of 1000 euros,” broadcast on France Inter. It is a road movie in the way that the film Tandem photography and tells the story of Frenchman … We are also preparing a new documentary with Christophe Nick on youth, called for now Generation Y. And I really want to achieve a draft fiction series around Rwanda.
D. F. Besides the adaptation of three of my books, I end for France 2, the writing of the second season of “Men of the shadow.”
What projects would you like to achieve?
D. F. I’d love to tell the boat wash-house, the era of Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and show in the form of feature film how did cubism. Also, I’m thinking, with Enki Bilal, how to adapt to and tell his hunting parties, while communist ideology are over.
A. B. I would like to work with American authors series or books that I consider to be visionaries. I think Warren Ellis and his book Transmetropolitan, Jason Horwitch and its series “Rubicon” on the issue of terrorism as well as David Simon, whose interest me all series in more developed.