Lastman Q&A: We Talk To The Director About The English Dub Season Finale

It has taken a while to get to this point, but the Lastman season finale streams this Friday on VRV/Mondo @ 4pm PST. As a result, we decided to talk to the director to see what fans can expect from not just the upcoming episode but both the franchise in general as well as his own projects which includes one that’s coming sooner than you think!

Jérémie Périn: The idea came from both the team behind the comic books (Bastien Vivès, Balak and Michaël Sanlaville) and me. When we started the discussion about an adaptation, the comic book authors had only published three volumes out of a planned twelve. They had a general idea of the continuity of their story but not all the details, so if we strictly adapted the comic books, they would be forced to restrict their imagination. They preferred to maintain the possibility of improvising and having creative freedom when starting a new volume. On my side, I was not really interested in making a simple conversion of their work into animation because I need to feel creative ownership in a project to be really into it. I need to reimagine a story to be invested. What I didn’t know before meeting the authors of the comic is that they wanted someone to reimagine their universe and expand it, just like they started to do with the video game Last Fight.

I just followed my desire as a viewer. I don’t make much of a distinction between animation and live-action. To me, both are part of the same thing we call cinema. They share mostly the same language. Only aesthetics and technology make them different. I draw, I love all kinds of movies… why not create cinematic fiction with drawings? And why not do that for grown-ups? I’m always attracted to unpopular or unexplored artistic areas. I’m obsessed with ideas I couldn’t translate into ideas suitable for children anyway.

Jérémie Périn: Total freedom.

Well… except that we had to respect some rules of course. Characters you find in both the comic books and the show had to be themselves and not suddenly have new personas in the TV series. Laurent Sarfati and I decided the main plot in collaboration with Balak, Vivès, and Sanlaville. Once we were all in agreement and had to work separately in our respective mediums, Laurent created a team of series writers in which Balak participated. It was really great to have him involved to ensure that all the new ideas we had for the show were compatible with their creative goals for the comic book.

Our lower budget also limited some of our choices, but it’s very common to have technical limitations of some sort… Ok, maybe we didn’t have total freedom. In fact, in a way, no one ever truly has total freedom in art… but we were very close.

Jérémie Périn: We share a lot of common influences, mostly because we’re all cinephiles/geeks from the same generation. They proposed my name as a director to the series producer, Didier Creste, because they felt from my previous work that we had the same influences in common. From Japanese animation, I would say Osamu Dezaki (Space Adventure Cobra), Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Wicked City), Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Girl Utena) and Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell). I also love many other directors, but they didn’t directly influence my work on Lastman. Most of my influences actually come from live-action films. This is also something with which the comic book authors would agree. We all love John McTiernan’s work, for example, as well as David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma, to name a few.

Jérémie Périn: I enjoyed almost every character, but some of them were difficult to work with because they had to deal with serious themes or had very shocking or edgy arcs. Those characters had to be more realistic, psychologically speaking — characters that can’t be categorized as good or bad because they are in a grey zone. This is very exciting of course, but not exactly “fun.” This would be Howard, Siri, Mendoza…  So I guess the funner ones to work with were the easy ones. The stupidest or always-the-same characters, like the Holy Father or Harry Zenkova; the junkies in episode 18 as well. It was so fun to write their dialogue or to draw them and depict their behavior. They are so unaware of themselves and the world that they can’t see how misguided they are.

Jérémie Périn: I don’t know exactly what’s been discussed by Balak and Laurent Sarfati.  I worked on this adaptation in my own way and found it very enjoyable and gratifying, but the budget for the first season was very limiting. Making a last-minute crowdfunding campaign to complete our financing was a logistical challenge that no one was prepared for.  I am looking forward to working on well-financed projects in the future.

Jérémie Périn: Last year I worked on two projects. The first one is a show called Crisis Jung. I co-created it with Baptiste Gaubert (one of the character designers on Lastman). Baptiste is co-directing with Jérémie Hoarau (assistant director on Lastman). Crisis Jung is a very dramatic and romantic post-apocalyptic show tainted with literal misunderstandings of Carl Jung’s theories. It’s super fun because it’s so serious and bold. That’s how I would describe it and how I hope the audience interprets it… Crisis Jung has the same relationship to Hokuto no Ken as Hokuto no Ken had with Mad Max. We tried to go further in the deconstruction of the genre and had some fun with all its imagery.

I mostly worked on the pre-production. I was part of the writing team and was also initially a consulting director. My involvement was finished when all the animatics were completed. Crisis Jung should be available soon on Blackpills, an SVOD platform available in the US.

My latest project is an animated sci-fi feature I’m currently writing with Laurent Sarfati (again). Regarding the scale of the film, we’re really early in the process — I’ve barely drawn characters. That’s all we can reveal at this point.

Jérémie Périn: Oh geez!… I can’t say anything. I don’t want to influence their thoughts or feelings. Just watch the final episode until the very end please… and tell all your friends to binge-watch it.

Jérémie Périn: Yes, of course. First, because I’d like to continue to be able to work on shows or movies that are appealing to me, which is… very selfish, I know… But to be honest it would benefit the animation genre to expand its scope and be more diversified. The main problem with animated shows for children is that they are made by adults who often make decisions about what is good or bad for kids, and because those shows have to be “safe,” we generally end up with really diluted and uncompelling series. Who would expect talented creators to work in animation given these results?

I’m pretty sure if we could make more adult animated shows in Europe, it would also improve the general quality of the whole system. Many artists and producers would become way more interested, motivated and involved in the great form of fiction that is animation, regardless of the audience for which it’s made.