Yahoo Lifestyle ‘I Lost My Body’ Director Jérémy Clapin on His Live-Action Debut ‘Meanwhile on Earth,’ Hitting U.S. Theaters This Friday
Oscar-nominated “I Lost My Body” director Jérémy Clapin’s science fiction drama “Meanwhile on Earth,” his live-action debut, will hit theaters in the U.S. Nov. 8, distributed by Metrograph Pictures.
The film follows Elsa (Megan Northam) who, three years after her brother Franck disappears in outer space, spends her days obsessing over the loss. Frozen in place by her grief, she passes her days at a dead-end job, visiting Franck’s bedroom or drawing comics to help cope. One picturesque evening, while stargazing near a radio tower, Elsa receives a message only she can hear from an extraterrestrial entity who says they can get Franck back to Earth, but only at a tremendous cost.
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Like “I Lost My Body” before it, “Meanwhile on Earth” was produced by Marc du Pontavice, a prolific animation producer and the founder and president of Xilam Animation. It was co-produced by Carcadice, France 3 Cinéma, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma and Umedia Ufund. Charades is handling international sales.
“Meanwhile on Earth” opened at the Berlinale earlier this year in the Panorama section and has toured the festival circuit since, most recently impressing audiences at Spain’s prestigious Sitges genre festival. It has received strong reviews from critics and positive endorsements from festival audiences and looks to charm American audiences this weekend.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical run, Clapin and Du Pontavice joined Variety to discuss the strengths and weaknesses animation filmmakers bring to live-action productions and why, even after a Critics’ Week win at Cannes and an Oscar nomination, it’s still a challenge to get backing for a feature film, animated or live-action.
Variety: This is your live-action filmmaking debut. Can you talk about the decision to try a new medium and was that always the plan for this project or a result of a choice made during development?
Clapin: We worked together for the first time on “I Lost My Body,” an animated film, and I come from animation. Marc has more experience in live action, but this was a long journey for me to do this film and I’ve always wanted to try live action. I’m always interested in working outside my comfort zone and trying other mediums. But you know how it works; animation takes so much time that it’s hard to find a good moment to switch. And, of course, after the success of “I Lost My Body,” there was interest in what I would do next. For me, there was momentum to do this movie, and I believed Marc was the right person to have by my side because of his previous live action experience. So really, as soon as the Oscar campaign for “I Lost My Body” was done, I started writing this film and always planned on doing it live action.
Du Pontavice: Having accompanied Jérémy all these years has taught me that his work and his cinematography expertly portray fantasy born from reality. If you think about “I Lost My Body,” it’s a film with grammar inspired by live action. It’s natural that Jérémy would come to the idea of portraying reality in live action, because it’s as close to real life as you can get and bringing the fantasy out of that footage makes a lot of sense. This was the right story to do it.
Where did the initial motivation come from to tell this story? And why did you decide to include the brief animated vignettes?
Clapin: The idea for this script came from my fascination with outer space. But we are on Earth, always facing the stars, looking into space. We’re fascinated by this territory that we cannot reach. For me, it’s almost like living in the present and looking into the past. When you look to the past or future, you’re fascinated because you can’t go there. So I wanted to build a story that takes place between our world and space, where everything mixes together and there is a character inside this blurred area between the two. I also wanted agents from the other side to enter that blurred area, and animation was part of the process to create the in-between world they have to navigate and to take the audience with them.
When directing an animated film, you have more or less complete control over what happens on the screen. The actors do exactly what you want them to, the weather cooperates, the sets are all idyllic. Was it difficult to adjust to the unpredictable nature of live-action filmmaking and concede that control?
Clapin: For me, that was an exciting part of the challenge. If I wanted to move to live action, I had to embrace the specificity of live action and invite the unpredictable parts of the medium. In animation, the cast is all in my hands, and I can control and change whatever I want. Everything can be highly scrutinized. That’s not the case in live action because you have the script, and after a bit of rehearsing, you jump into shooting. We had to face nature, the weather and so many unpredictable factors.
Du Pontavice: I regularly travel between live action and animation. This time was a really fabulous experience to work with someone who operates spiritually and mentally like an animation filmmaker. One thing I learned on “I Lost My Body” is that Jérémy is one of those directors you rarely find in live action, who mentally picture exactly what they want each scene to be. It’s quite amazing, because Jérémy would still be storyboarding scenes the day before with precisely what he wants from each scene the following day. At 6:00 a.m., the whole team would have that storyboard in hand and do a remarkable job adjusting reality to Jérémy’s vision. The whole team was strongly motivated because it’s exciting when you know exactly what a director wants and can deliver it. The actors, too. For them, it was difficult because the director didn’t have experience working with actors. On the other hand, with such clear expectations, the actors always knew what was expected of them.
How are the challenges alike or different in getting backing for an adult animated feature and a sci-fi live-action feature? Were there industry expectations that you should have followed up “I Lost My Body” with another animated film?
Du Pontavice: I hate thinking this is the case, but when you do an animated film today, you always have to justify why you’re telling your story with animation. If it’s not a kids’ story, anyway. As soon as a story is meant for adults, you have to explain why you aren’t doing it in live action. That becomes a bit easier when you start playing with genre. Whatever genre, whether it be horror, science fiction, fantasy. Whenever you try to introduce something that isn’t completely real, then it’s easier to justify to the industry why you’re doing this in animation. Again, that’s a terrible question to have to answer; we should not be answering that question at all.
Clapin: In terms of funding, it is still difficult to get financing for animated films, and much more so if it’s for adult viewers. Everyone wants to make [adult animation], but it’s still very difficult to get it made. I think it helps to mix genres, though. If you want to bring young people to the cinema, you have to give them a surprise. You need to take them to a destination they didn’t plan to go to. But that’s not always easy either.
Du Pontavce: If we’d gone from one animated film [“I Lost My Body”] to another one, I think financing would have been easier. Just as it’s always easier to go from one live-action film to another. When you cross mediums, there is always hesitation from the industry. It requires a lot of convincing and explaining, but I think we created enough curiosity with “I Lost My Body” to get people’s attention. The market is built on repeating recipes, and every time you try to do something different, there is strong hesitation. So, in the case of this film, crossing genres to science fiction, crossing mediums to live action, no big stars in the cast, it wasn’t exactly a recipe for success. But we managed to put it together.
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