Franck was acutely aware of all this as he turned on his phone to find eight messages and a torrent of emails from Liem and Travis. He dreaded the messages, but opened them one by one to see how their offensive was going. He could tell they were testing him just by skimming through their proposals; they were trying to get him to give in and be a good dog while they showed him who was boss. It wasn’t just a collaboration with Netflix. Their idea was to sell them shares, so Netflix would own a part of Alpha Productions. Not content with handing over his library, they were prepared to hand over control as well. As he looked at the attached documents, Franck realised that this time they were going ahead without him. They were intending to sign a broadcasting contract with an exclusivity clause, but he knew from experience that once the fox is in the henhouse you’ll never get it out. As he looked through the new clauses, he wondered whether he was dealing with two evil geniuses, or two reckless idiots. He had underestimated them from the beginning. He had let himself be swayed by their youth and vigour, which he assumed brought a fresh approach, drive and knowledge about new technology – all the things that he now found annoying.

He was used to reading contractual documents, but these seemed convoluted and bizarrely translated from English by a software programme, with expressions that were incomprehensible. The new clauses were covered in coloured highlighter on the PDF document. He was lost. Rather than trying to make sense of it all, he called them. As he had feared, the conversation went badly from the start. Liem and Travis always insisted on putting the phone on loudspeaker, so he never knew who had just spoken because their two voices constantly overlapped. Franck never liked these noisy telephone conversations, but especially not now that it was two against one in the middle of a café. Every time he talked business with them, he felt as helpless as he would if a smartphone salesman were explaining new apps to him that he would never use. This time Liem and Travis were aggressive and full of confidence. They said it was important to think long-term and get ahead of the market and make the most of the new European directives that would soon be voted on in Brussels, protectionist measures that from 2019 would force the tech giants to reinvest fifteen per cent of the revenue they made in France into local production companies.