Inspired by the life of former DJ Sven Hansen-Løve, Eden is also a sprawling document of the origins of electronic music in France in the early ’90s. Directed by Hansen-Løve’s sister, Mia, the film wades through his journey as a DJ in a scene that spurned acts like Daft Punk (who make an appearance in the film). It’s an intoxicating story that moves at its own pace, and Hansen-Løve takes great care to create a sense of time’s ephemerality. The film stars Felix De Givry as the central character, Paul, and also stars Pauline Etienne, Vincent Macaigne, Hugo Conzelmann and Greta Gerwig.

In conversation at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, I spoke to Sven and Felix about their experience working on Eden and representing the roots of French electronic music on-screen.

Eden is out in San Francisco this Friday.

Something I found interesting is that the film, chronologically, ends around where we are now, in the present.
Felix: When I spoke about the film to Mia, she said she likes all her films to end in the present time.

Why is that?
Felix: To remember when she makes her film? I don’t know. I think it’s to feel the passage of time even more in the film. I think if she did a movie in the 1800s she wouldn’t end today, but she’s only been doing movies about modern times.

Sven: We end up in about 2014 because she wanted to put the Daft Punk “Within” in the movie. The story is mostly based on my souvenirs, my memories. Some of the things you see happened to me, but only up to 2011, actually. Not 2014. [laughs]

I heard that you were an aspiring teacher.
Sven: I’m doing some studies, and then I’m moving to Spain. Maybe I’ll be teaching French there.

So you stopped your literature studies way back when to be a DJ, and you’ve just now picked that back up?
Sven: Yeah, it’s true. When my sister decided to do the film I had already decided to do literature again. More or less, it relates to reality.

Let’s talk about the inception of the film. Were you and your sister looking for a way to collaborate on a project, or did this just kind of happen organically?
Sven: It was a few years ago. She wanted to do a film different from her previous ones, which she saw as a trilogy. She wanted to try a new direction. She asked me if I was interested. It was natural, but I wouldn’t say organic.

I was just a kid in the ’90s, so I had no idea about this subculture you guys cover in the film. How old were you in the ’90s, Felix?
Felix: I was born in ’91, so I was just a kid. Every movie about a generation either happens while it’s happening or twenty years later. It’s a new trend to do a biopic. It wasn’t as common in previous years of cinema.

Sven: This is the first film to really show this scene. Usually, biopics are about things that are way in the past, but this is pretty recent.

Felix, your career’s very young, but so far you’ve got a great resume going.
Felix: This is my first film. I had a very small part in Olivier Assayas’ film, Something in the Air. But this is the first real film I’ve done. I plan on being selective. That doesn’t mean a lot of projects will come to me, but I plan on not doing several movies a year. I’m not planning on being an actor the way most other actors are.

Sven: It’s not so easy to find good projects. There are not so many.

Felix: Right. And in order to be an actor there’s this vicious circle, that you have to do a lot of movies in order to be present in the media. It’s a vicious circle. I do a lot of other projects on the side, and if I do act in other films, which is something I want, it would only be in movies that feel essential to me. I would love to act in a Coen brothers film.

Is that a goal of yours?
Felix: Yeah. They’re the best [storytellers] these days. They jump between genres of film. Really fascinating.

If I was a first-time actor approaching Eden, like you did, I’d be really scared.
Felix: Yeah. It’s huge. The script was 170 pages or something. I read it at night and it was for two films, and it was even more fluid. It was a gigantic project.

Sven, Mia’s said that this movie was a way for you to move on from that period of your life.
Sven: Yeah, it was a sort of catharsis, from A to Z. I was invested in every aspect of the process. I was so into it that I didn’t have distance from it, but now I can see that it helped me.

Do you have a sense of pride in the fact that you’re representing in film this culture that hasn’t really been seen before?
Sven: I wouldn’t use the word “pride.” Giving something to people that they didn’t know before is interesting.

After acting in this movie, has your musical taste changed at all?

Felix: I do listen to more garage and house and deep house music. My taste is more contemporary; I have a label and I produce music. What’s funny is that I understand more now a certain scene that is very present today, the deep house and techno scene. I know the roots through the film. It helps me have a clear vision of music today. The film really traces the roots, and it’s really fascinating that it was really just a group of 200, 300 people who committed to this music at first in the early ’90s.

Sven: We actually had a lot of teenagers who saw the film come to see us. They’re so happy to discover all of this.

The movie’s all about details. What’s a small moment that was particularly true to life for you?
Sven: The Daft Punk scene where they try to get into the club. They told us that story, and it’s completely real.

Felix: It makes them more human. That’s what they liked about the movie.

Sven: There’s also the scene near the end where there’s the New Years Eve party on the boat and no one came. That happened. Nobody showed up.

Would you have agreed to do a film about your life with anyone but your sister?
Sven: No, I don’t think so.

Are there any plans to expand on this project? You said it was originally two films.

Sven: No. That time is over. [laughs]

Felix: There were scenes in Sweden that were in part 2 originally but were cut due to budget issues. There’s also a short film that’s about the same character.

Did you film chronologically?
Felix: No. In the apartment we shot all of the scenes with the three girlfriends over three days. It was really strange. The biggest challenge maybe were the sex scenes. We were supposed to shoot one in New York, but we went over budget and over time. We shot it three months later in Paris, so the pressure was on. It’s strange. There are many reasons why sex scenes are strange. One of the actresses was married to a guy who was working on the scene, so her husband was right there.

How do you feel about the state of music today?
Sven: I think it’s getting better, much better than in 2000. Music’s starting to sell again. Obviously CDs are over, but on the internet, things are moving.

Hello, my name is Whitni Ciofalo and I have a confession to make. I download music from the Internet, illegally and religiously. I guess I started when I was in high school, or maybe even middle school. You know how the story goes, it started innocently with Napster and over the years I just sort of lost control of myself. I know what I am doing is wrong, but I guess I have never had to directly deal with the implications. Now that I am living abroad and with the accessibility of easy downloading methods, I just cannot help myself…

I have another confession to make, I am seriously jealous of the historian of the future. Not only will they not have to live through the Tea Party Revolution, they will also have the opportunity to critique the digitalization of music with an impartiality that I could never have. The legality debate, which is now spanning decades, opened a new chapter last week, with the merger of Universal Music Group (UMG) and EMI record labels.

Contrary to the claims lawsuits that defined the noughties, major record labels have scarcely suffered since music went digital. Recent figures show that the four label giants, UMG, Warner Music Group (WMG), Sony, and EMI, make up ninety percent of the current market. With some really simple math and the most basic definition of independent music, that means that Way Too Indie should only be covering ten percent of the music produced by market value. (It becomes a little more complicated when you factor in the fact that WMG owns forty-nine percent of such beloved indie labels as Sub Pop.)

When you combine the powers of UMG and EMI, they account for nearly forty percent of the market. In the fictional world of musical democracy, that would be an uncontestable win. In blogosphere, it would be tagged under juggernaut.  As for the real world, it is unlikely that this will bode well for music fans and independent musicians.

Let me break this down for you. Not only are Taylor Swift, Will.I.Am, Mumford & Sons, Justin Bieber, the Killers, and Rihanna now on the same label as David Bowie, Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem, the Smiths, Röyksopp, and Talking Heads, but the newly formed UMG-EMI group now stands to be a formidable force when it comes to the handling of music sales.

Hypothetically speaking, lets say that UMG-EMI goes into 2013 with forty percent market control. Independent labels will make up a mere ten percent, and for argument sake, Sony and WMG split the remaining fifty percent equally. If we were to take the top ten singles according to iTunes for September 24^th 2012, EVERY SINGLE ONE was released by one of the four major record labels or a label owned by them. Even worse, seven of the top ten singles were released by UMG-EMI.

Now say you are running a startup company resembling Spotify, Pandora, or even iTunes in its infancy. To be competitive, you will have to secure the rights to music that people are actually listening to. Musical tastes aside, if you have any desire to be a profitable business, you will be catering to the major labels. No, scratch that, you will be bending over backwards for UMG-EMI. All credit may be given to the Federal Trade Commission.

If all of this sounds like quixotic economics rant, my apologies. But chances are if you are still reading this, you are probably doing so while streaming music online or listening to a $0.99 single purchased on iTunes. Please pause and enjoy the moment.

Because Spotify, Pandora, iTunes will now be answering to the whims and wishes of UMG-EMI and that could mean the end of affordable music apps and digital downloads. Here’s to hoping the economy turns around and a rebirthing of FM radio, as your music dependency could get real expensive in the very near future.

As for the world of independent music, the outcome appears to be even more dismal. In a recent NPR interview, Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear commented on how royalties from online music sales are so watered down by the time they reach the hands of musicians, the real beneficiaries are the music streaming companies and the major labels. That capitalization on the work of artists is only going to increase under this newly monopolized market. If you would like a visualization for that horrid fact, I think this one, albeit being two years old, summarizes it quite accurately. Otherwise, the Oatmeal nailed it with this more comical interpretation.

So where does that leave us? Well, lets go back to my opening confession. I am not about to advocate following me down the path of criminal behavior, especially considering that not all of you are privileged to living beyond the jurisdiction of United States copyright laws. Instead I would like to pose an alternative approach, while adding a caveat to my previous statement. Yes, I do download albums illegally. However, I can also say that I paid for physical, tangible copies of four of the last six albums I reviewed. The other two were deleted after I finished the reviews.

I am in full support of previewing an album, in its entirety–I like to equate it to test driving a new car or trying on a pair of pants before you buy them. Yet, I do not think that it is unreasonable to ask that we show the musicians that we love a little respect by buying their sound-track-to-your-summer or post-break-up-savior album. Think of it as a symbiotic relationship between you and the musician. While you are nursing that relationship, do it a favor and cut out the middleman. It costs you the same to download an album from bandcamp, the artist’s personal website, or from iTunes, but the latter is shaving a larger personal profit off the top.

The future of indie music will thank you, although UMG-EMI probably will not.

Tron: Legacy is a sequel to the original 1982 sci-fi cult classic Tron. Most of the film takes place in a video game fantasyland which shows off the film’s impressive visual effects. Even though this sequel was made 28 years after the original, thanks to crafty CGI, they bring back two of the same actors. Although the film looks extraordinary, the storyline is not far from ordinary. And since they had 28 years to create this sequel, this should not have been an issue.

In a flashback set in 1989 we see Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a visionary inventor and CEO of ENCOM, speaking to his young son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) before he leaves on his motorcycle. That was the last time Sam would see his father as he mysteriously disappeared after claiming a major breakthrough in his work.

It is now 2010, Sam is an adult and primary shareholder of ENCOM. He has more interest in being a rebel than he does as becoming a CEO. Case-in-point, when Sam breaks into ENCOM’s building and steals the new Operating System just as they were about to release it. Not only that, but he uploads it to the internet for the public to download for free. After watching the film, I fail to see the relevance of this other than showing that Sam is good with computers and is not afraid of authority.

A longtime family friend, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) informs Sam that his father had stopped by his house a couple days before he disappeared with news that he will change the world. Adding to the strangeness, Alan got a page from his father’s arcade from a number that has been disconnected for 20 years. Alan gives Sam the keys to the arcade even though Sam is reluctant about going back.

Despite the fact Sam was not very enthusiastic about going to his father’s old arcade, he does anyway. As he puts his quarter into an old Tron arcade game, but it spits it back out. It is then that he somehow realizes that there is something more to this game cabinet. Behind it is a passage to his father’s secret office. The office that he claimed will change the world as Sam soon finds out. After searching around on his father’s computer, he somehow activates a trigger that transports him into The Grid of Tron.

There are a few things you must know about this new cyberspace. There is no such thing as a world, instead it is referred to as The Grid. Years are referred to as cycles. Humans do not exist, instead they are called users and robot super-humans are programs.

Sam soon finds out that the same computerized world his father invented is also where he has been stuck for the past 20 years. After Sam reunites with his father he is informed on what happened. His father tried to create a perfect world but instead Clu had manifested to destroy him. He is effectively trapped inside The Grid as the portal to escape only is open for a limited amount of time.

The plot of Tron: Legacy is remarkably flat. Scenes either go into great detail about things that do not matter or are ones that even a movie novice could predict. Thankfully, the visual effects were enough to keep you entertained.

Simply put, the visuals were stunning. The alternate universe of Tron was rendered beautifully. You could tell time was spent with the details, from the characters costumes to the trails left by vehicles. The game of discs that were thrown at opponents looked amazing. It baffles me why it was robbed from being nominated for Best Visual Effects at this year’s Oscars. Even though Inception deserved to win that category, this deserved a nomination for their achievement.

Although, the soundtrack is pretty solid, it mostly comprised of typical blockbuster action film style of music up until about an hour into the film. It is then where you really start to hear Daft Punk signature sound of music. Coincidentally, Daft Punk even makes their first cameo appearance around the same time. The soundtrack is easily one of the better qualities of the film.

Sam was way too confident of a character to make the story work. He seems to know everything and question nothing, even in a world of The Grid which normal physics do not apply. For that reason, it is impossible to connect to the character emotionally. This makes it hard to root for the character.

Kudos to the director Joseph Kosinski for keeping Jeff Bridges from the original film in this sequel. The special effects used to de-age him are surprisingly realistic. Jeff Bridges is good but not great here, the script is likely to be blamed for it. However, one cannot help but enjoy him showing glimpses of The Dude from The Big Lebowski, even though the line, “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man”, seems very out of place.

Even though Tron: Legacy had an estimated budget of $170 million, top notch visual effects, soundtrack by Daft Punk, Academy Award winning Jeff Bridges, it forgot an important quality that makes a film great – an engaging storyline. The dialogue was pretty poor thus making the acting sub-par. Let’s hope if they plan on doing another sequel in 2038, that it does not suffer from such critical downfalls.