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SÉRIES MANIA 2022 Séries Mania Forum

Benjamin Elalouf • Productor de Hormones

"Siempre quise encontrar un equilibrio entre los proyectos con conceptos poderosos y directores con una visión singular"

por 

- El responsable de la compañía francesa Moonshaker habla del proyecto presentado en las Co-Pro Pitching Sessions de Séries Mania Forum y de su línea editorial

Benjamin Elalouf • Productor de Hormones

Este artículo está disponible en inglés.

On the rise since its creation ten years ago, Moonshaker is now launching into the world of series, following three feature films (Play [+lee también:
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by Anthony Marciano, Le Brio [+lee también:
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by Yvan Attal, Smart Ass [+lee también:
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by Kim Chapiron) and the (Netflix) documentary Lords of Scam by Guillaume Nicloux. We met up with Benjamin Elalouf, the founder and director of the Parisian company, selected at the Co-Pro Pitching Session of Séries Mania Forum (read the news) with Hormones, a project of six episodes of 52 minutes, (written by Noé Debré and Joachim Schnerf) in English, which he is producing with TOP - The Oligarchs Productions.

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Cineuropa: What is Hormones about?
Benjamin Elalouf : It’s the story of two brothers in 1930s Holland. One of them inherits a slaughterhouse and convinces the other, a medical student in Amsterdam, to create a laboratory within it, because he has read in a medical journal that insulin could be found in animals’ intestines, a very lucrative market that was only beginning at the time. While researching this, they will first discover estrogen, the female hormone, and they will find out a little by chance that this is the first means of contraception, since the pill functions via hormonal dosage. But by discovering this, they will create a revolution in the village they live in, one that isn’t at all ready to receive this innovation and all the changes it will bring. 

Where did the story come from?
Joachim Schnerf and Noé Debré are very old friends. Joachim is a writer, but also an editor of foreign novels at Grasset. A few years ago, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, he fell in love with the book of a historian. He talked about it with Noé and they decided to reach out to her and to turn it into a series. They developed it a little on their own, then came to see me because I’ve been working with Noé Debré (who has already written and worked as showrunner on the series Parlement [+lee también:
entrevista: Benjamin Elalouf
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, in a tone and genre that are very different from Hormones) for a long time. I immediately found it very exciting, but difficult because it was my first series as a producer. I therefore suggested to the team from TOP - The Oligarchs Productions, which has made what I consider the be the most international and the best French series, The Bureau [+lee también:
entrevista: Frédéric Lavigne
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, to produce it with me, and Alex Berger immediately said yes with a lot of enthusiasm. We have now signed a co-development agreement with Canal+ and are now writing the show.

Fictional films, a documentary for Netflix and now a series. What is the editorial line of Moonshaker? What is its development strategy?
When the company was created, I gave myself as a principle that I wouldn’t know how to produce things I wouldn’t watch. But I watch films, series, documentaries, and I’ve always wanted to find a balance between projects with powerful concepts and directors with a singular vision. I feel like before, this balance was entirely the prerogative of cinema, and that now there exists a place for French series between the culture of the pure French auteur and the American culture of the all-powerful screenwriter. This creates the possibility of doing things differently, and in fact, even Americans seem to have adopted it too, because today, a series must be ambitious in its writing, but also in its form, as exemplified by Euphoria. There is a general tendency: we no longer really see frontiers between television, cinema, and the platforms. 

Another characteristic of your productions is that you often work in partnership with other companies.
I created Moonshaker very quickly and the projects rapidly followed one another. I therefore often asked for the help of “big brothers.” I learned a lot with Dimitri Rassam (Chapter 2) and now with Alex Berger. More generally, I like working in groups and it is pleasant to share with others the successes, but also the stress, because producing is rather solitary work. But I am now also developing series alone. And a few months ago, I concluded a partnership with Newen who has acquired shares in Moonshaker. The goal is to be able to have the muscle to produce alone in a delegated way, which will be the case on two feature films in the coming months. The first is The Last of the Jews by Noé Debré (read the news) which is supported by the advance on receipts of the CNC, the Ile-de-France region, a pre-buy from Canal+ and Ad Vitam as distributor, and which started filming two weeks ago, with Agnès Jaoui in the cast among others. I produced Noé’s three short films as director, and he also worked on the script for Smart Ass and Le Brio, so it is for the two of us the beginning of a new, bigger adventure. The second project, which will begin in May, is Le procès Goldman [+lee también:
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entrevista: Cédric Kahn
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 by Cédric Kahn which will be set in the 1970s and follow a character with a very dramatic journey, and who represents an important part of French political history.  

And what about series?
I have a lot of projects currently in development, whose details I cannot yet reveal, including one with Yolande Zauberman. The rhythm is dictated by our desires, I do not give myself a minimum or maximum limit on the number of projects I take on every year. But as long as there is that desire, I will find the time, the energy and the money necessary to bring them to a successful conclusion.

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(Traducción del francés)

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