This literary season, a book signed by a mysterious Mody will be published by Editions du Masque, a collection with iconic yellow and black covers, created in 1927 (owned by JC Lattès since 1996). Some big names in crime fiction have been published there (Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Andrea H. Japp, Pierre Véry, etc.), a genre accustomed to pseudonyms and editorial enigmas. But it’s a new twist that writes The Black Butterflies.
“During our work on the screenplay, which lasted for years, Bruno and I became certain that we had to break down the fourth wall, that of the camera, in order to make the usual boundary between fiction and reality porous. »Olivier Abbou
Under the jacket, where the title of the book and the name of the author appear in black on a yellow background, hides a second cover: the name of the true signatory of the text, Gabriel Katz (a pseudonym), is written there in yellow on a black background. . This prolific author has authored around thirty books in different genres (fantasy, children’s books, comics, etc.) over the past ten years; he is also accustomed to disappearing when he officiates as a penman.
For The Black Butterflies, Gabriel Katz has taken up a unique challenge, akin to a game of Russian dolls, between literature and television series. In the series black butterflies, which will be broadcast from September 22 on Arte, a writer of crime novels out of inspiration (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is recruited by a cantankerous old gentleman (Niels Arestrup) to write his Memoirs.
The writer is called Adrien but officiates under the name of Mody. For a fee, he is supposed to write the autobiography of Albert Desiderio, but ends up seizing the story of his sponsor to relaunch his career, without imagining that the old man is not who he believes – and , above all, without seeing the noose of intrigues mixing past and present, fiction and reality, tighten around him. In real life, it was Gabriel Katz who wrote Adrien’s (aka Mody) book, the creation of which is central to the six-episode series.
An unprecedented synergy in France
Contacted in early 2021 by Violaine Chivot, editorial manager of Editions du Masque, and Véronique Cardi, CEO of JC Lattès, Katz only had a few months to work: screenwriters and directors Olivier Abbou and Bruno Merle started filming in the spring of 2021 and needed the text to make it appear on the screen repeatedly. “I wanted to film the text that the character played by Nicolas Duvauchelle types on his computer. There is also a scene in a bookstore where Adrien-Mody reads the beginning of his novel…”, says Olivier Abbou. Imagine being able to hold in your hands the series of Misery who made the sequestered writer of Stephen King’s novel famous, or see on the big screen I present to you Pamela, the imaginary film of which The American night, by François Truffaut, chronicles the filming.
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