About a year ago, comic book author James Tynion IV was on a long drive back to New York City from a friend’s engagement upstate when he got an email from French artist Elsa Charretier asking him if he’d be interested in writing the script for a short film she and longtime partner Pierrick Colinet were making.
The reaction from Tynion, the best-selling creator who has several comics on the go such as Something Is Killing the Children and Department of Truth as well as a Substack comic newsletter, was an almost immediate no. “I’m working on a million things, I don’t have time for this,” Tynion thought.
“By the time I got back to the city, I got an idea in my head, and I was like, ‘Yes, I want to do this,’” Tynion recalled in a Zoom conversation with The Hollywood Reporter.
A year later, Tynion has written his first ever script and the project, titled Room Service, is hitting Kickstarter Wednesday to fund what would be a 16-minute short directed by Colinet, a comic creator who has worked on Star Wars comics as well as such titles as Superfreaks and goes by the name PK. Charretier, who is currently making waves with the meta-textual take on romance comics, Love Everlasting, and hosts a YouTube channel focused on comic art, has drawn the storyboards.
“All three of us have a strong independent streak,” said Tynion. “We like funding our own books. We like working outside the more corporate comic publisher system to bring our projects into the world. And we like experimenting and trying new things. So this was something we can build together, outside of the system, so that we can really bring our personal touch to it, and show what we can do when we’re completely unfettered.”
In grisly fashion, of course.
Room Service is the story of a down-on-his-luck man who’s pulled deep into a dark underworld of the ultrawealthy. He embraces what the system can offer him but at tremendous cost to himself.
Colinet held a few conversations with Tynion prior to the latter writing but didn’t specify story details nor even genre (though with Tynion, you know it’s going to be on the creepy, unsettling and visceral side). “We just talked about theme, about feelings, about anxieties, about mood. And some movies we really loved,” said Colinet. “And when I got the script I was blown away. It was so tailored for me.”
The project aims to find a place amid such titles as Get Out, Parasite and The Invisible Man, horror movies with an undercurrent of social commentary.
Charretier took on the project not only to help Colinet, for whom she used to star in home movies the pair would make when they were tweens, but to flex a different artistic muscle.
“As a comic book artist, my job is to find the least amount of moments you can put into a panel to tell a story,” said Charretier. “You have to cut away as much as possible and allow the readers to fill in those blanks. But when you storyboard a movie, that’s very different. You think of movement, camera movement, and blocking. I didn’t know how to do that at first.”
Filming will commence if the project is funded, and the story is designed in such a way that it can be upscaled or downscaled depending on the funding.
Skulldigger artist Tonči Zonjić, who worked as a concept artist on Star Wars, has designed the mask for the mysterious character known only as the Caretaker.
This being Kickstarter, there are rewards for those who contribute, among them an artbook that will document the film’s creation; a poster by artist Martin Simmonds (Tynion’s collaborator on The Department of Truth); a Kickstarter exclusive poster by Charretier; and a stand-alone prose short story by Tynion, set in the world of the film, featuring Charretier’s spot illustrations. There will also be prints by five all-star comic book creators, including Rafael Albuquerque (American Vampire), Cliff Chiang (Paper Girls), Francesco Francavilla (Night of The Ghoul), Jim Mahfood (Grrl Scouts) and Charretier.
The project can be supported starting tomorrow, with the prelaunch landing page already up and running. The goal is to shoot next year and have the movie completed by September 2023.
Of course, the short may only be the beginning as the three creators have bigger plans for Service.
“This project will act as a proof of concept for a feature film,” admitted Colinet.
Revealed Tynion: “The first one is very stripped down and gets to the heart of it. But then the core idea, if we expand, will allow us to tap into some greater mysteries and bigger scares.”
Then he added, “Let’s just see where the first step on this journey takes us.”
Below is a poster for the short:
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