“Black Box” is the second collaboration between director Yann Gozlan and actor Pierre Niney, after “An Ideal Man” was released in 2015. Two thrillers with very different plots, but between which Yann Gozlan has established an amusing link, the help of its main character.
Pierre Niney and Yann Gozlan, a winning team
In 2015, Yann Gozlan directed An ideal mana thriller that draws the viewer into a thrilling story of literary imposture. For his second feature film, the director offers himself a brilliant cast, notably Pierre Niney, Ana Girardot, and André Marcon. Pierre Niney plays a young writer, Mathieu Vasseur, who fails to get published. One day, while supporting himself as a mover, he comes across a manuscript whose author has just died. He appropriates this manuscript by changing the title and signing it with his name.
The novel is a success, which opens the doors of glory, recognition, and love to the young writer. But three years later, a man who knew the true author of the novel undertakes to blackmail him, leading to dramatic events.
With more than 670,000 admissions in France, An ideal man is a great success, which once again confirms the talent of Pierre Niney and reveals that of Yann Gozlan. After burnout was released in 2017, where this time the director directed François Civil, in 2019, he reunited with Pierre Niney for the filming of Black Box which will be released in theaters in September 2021. This new thriller is receiving rave reviews, passes the million admissions mark, receives the audience awards from the Festival du Film Policier de Reims and the Festival du Film Francophone d’Angoulême, as well as several nominations for the César 2022.
In Black Box, Pierre Niney plays a BEA acoustician who investigates an air crash, obsessed with discovering the truth to the point of endangering his mental health… Little report a priori with the plot ofAn ideal man and yet the two characters have an important point in common.
Mathieu Vasseur, one and the same character?
It’s paradoxical, but the bigger it is, the more it passes, and that’s when we have the evidence under our noses that we see it the least. Indeed, in An ideal man as in Black Box, the character played by Pierre Niney has exactly the same name: Mathieu Vasseur. It happens that from one film to another, all genres combined, a character has the same name as another. It is very often a coincidence, it can sometimes be a wink. But it is extremely rare for the same director to give the same name to the main character of two very distinct films even more so if the actor playing him is the same!
You can’t suspect Yann Gozlan, given the care, he takes in his writing and production, of having been lazy in assigning the same first and last name to his character. We can therefore put forward the serious hypothesis that this is a deliberate way of constructing a multi-faceted male character who has a knack for putting himself in complicated situations, caught in a confusion between reality and fiction, and with a slight tendency to paranoia.
Pierre Niney has already been Mathieu Vasseur twice for Yann Gozlan, so we can say that we certainly know the name of the future character embodied by the actor if they meet a third time for a new film!
