‘Gainsbourg’ Animated Documentary Offers Intimate, Revealing Portrait of Larger-Than-Life French Pop Icon and Provocateur (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias Serge Gainsbourg, the French pop poet and provocateur who courted controversy while scaling the heights of stardom over the course of his decades-spanning career, is the subject of an upcoming animated documentary from Logical Pictures and the company’s The Jokers Lab documentary label.

The film will be featured in the co-production forum this week at Rome’s MIA Market. Based on a 1989 interview the fading pop icon gave with French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles just two years before his death, “Gainsbourg: Rue de Verneuil” charts the life of a musician whose career was marked by public scandals, torrid love affairs and often abusive relationships — all of which drew widespread media attention to the famed Parisian, who died in 1991 at the age of 62. “Gainsbourg” is written by Gilles Cayatte and Daniela de Felice and directed by Cayatte, with Cyril Houplain serving as artistic director.

Logical’s Frédéric Fiore and The Jokers Lab’s Carole Mirabello are producing. The long-gestating feature traces its roots back to the late-2000s, when Mirabello met Christian Fevret, the French journalist who in 1989 recorded the intimate interview with Gainsbourg. “Fast forward to 2016, and he handed me the entire collection of audio tapes, suggesting they might be the foundation for a film,” said Mirabello. “The conversation was so personal and raw, though, that I struggled to envision how to bring it to life through conventional archival footage.” The veteran producer pressed pause on plans for a traditional documentary, and the tapes remained in a box for several years.