This Friday, June 14, a hearing must be held at the Paris judicial court, notes “Le Parisien”. The reason: Vincent Dietschy, screenwriter and director, sued Netflix in a summary summons. His request: the suspension of the broadcast of the film on the platform. He accuses the streaming giant of having stolen his script for the film “Sous la Seine”, currently number 1 in the site’s world rankings, with nearly 41 million views recorded in five days after it was put online on June 5 last year.
An almost identical scenario
The blockbuster directed by Xavier Gens with Bérénice Béjo tells how, “summer 2024, when Paris hosts for the first time the triathlon world championships on the Seine. Sophia, a brilliant scientist, is alerted by Mika, a young activist dedicated to ecology, of the presence of a large shark in the depths of the river.“, we can read in the synopsis. With the help of the river brigade, she will try to track down this dangerous specimen, before it is too late.
READ ALSO: “3 hours of filming possible per day”: The director of “Sous la Seine” (Netflix) explains how they managed to film in Paris
However, the filmmaker’s scenario, imagined according to him in 2011, closely resembles this story. Last April, “Le Monde” revealed the matrix of the project, entitled “Silure”, and submitted to the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images, for a request for writing assistance on February 3 2014 : “A young policewoman, a diver at the Paris river brigade, finds herself confronted with an unprecedented natural phenomenon, embodied by a gigantic catfish, terribly aggressive and a killer of human beings.“, we can read.
“While the monster sows panic in the capital, threatening the mayor’s policies a few days before the choice of the city which will organize the Olympic Games, the heroine finds herself on the front line to face this figure of evil of a new kind. Helped in her fight by a young ichthyologist from the CNRS, she gets closer at the same time to her hierarchical superior, Commander“.
“My goal is for the theft of which I was a victim to be recognized”
According to Vincent Dietschy, the similarities between the two scenarios are disturbing, down to the smallest details: a prologue far from Paris, the description of the heroine, the characters of an environmental activist and a brigade leader establishing a relationship with the character main, but also the Olympic Games or a mutant fish. “All these elements were in the scenario” protests the director in the columns of “Parisien”. “MEven the idea of going to intercept the fish in the lock of the port of Arsenal, which is not the most obvious place in Paris, was in my project. You can’t tell me that again, it’s a coincidence“, he adds.
His project was also submitted in October 2012 to the SACD, the authors’ society. For its part, the “Sharks” project, which corresponds to the original name of “Sous la Seine”, was submitted in April 2015.We noted no less than 135 points of contact between the project and the film. My goal is for the theft of which I was a victim to be recognized” adds the filmmaker, who assures not to have “gave up on achieving“this feature film that he imagined as”a great popular film“.
