The return of the western: the new conquest of the west by Éric Atlan

With the experience of producing, often happy and sometimes unhappy, 140 short films and 25 feature films, including five of which he directed, Éric Atlan decided to innovate in the world of the seventh art by playing the transversality map.

He began by devoting three years to documenting and writing the 1,500 pages of Jack Love, whose hero is a child kidnapped, then raised by torturers who turn him into a thug. He divided the whole into five novels of which he is the editor. The adventure begins in 1849 in Spain, continues in California, at the time of the conquest of the West, and ends today. The first volume, The River of Blood has just been published.

At the same time, Atlan tackled the adaptation, the screenplay, the production and the composition of the original soundtrack with an arranger, Marc Bercovitz. He finally established the schedule for the distribution in bookstores of the following volumes, according to the different stages of the production of the film which he presents as a French western with a grand spectacle. “I met historians specializing in America,” he says. “They told me, in detail, the reality of the country in the 19th century, and the daily life of modest farmers who devoted their lives to a land that they tilled while imploring God to help them in the most difficult times. This climate was once perfectly transmitted on screen by John Ford, but unfortunately overused over subsequent generations. It seems to me that the time has come to go back to basics.” He finally made contact, via social networks, with people nostalgic for this era who, in the heart of deep America, but also in other countries, live with their families on ranches, raise horses, and live everyday life. long ago in cowboy costume, and weapons always at the ready.

To ensure the financing of the whole, he chose not to limit himself exclusively to the traditional channel of co-production and aid to the seventh art: he began to call on private partners from industry and finance tempted by an investment in a universe that is hardly familiar to them. He has already raised part of the sum which will allow him throughout the adventure to mix special effects, computers, black and white and technicolor, which he wrongly believes have been neglected for several decades. He has finally decided to give a chance to potential talents rather than established headliners with sometimes excessive financial demands. He has just started casting, allowing him to find actresses and actors, or even people from the street, who he judges capable of transmitting on screen the strength, energy, emotion and naturalness that 'they sometimes hide deep within themselves.

Filming will begin at the start of the school year, in France, Spain, the United States and Canada. “I imagined a human adventure,” he said. It will also become so in reality.”