Exclusive Interview: Pantheon’s Director Juno Lee On The Show’s Enthralling First Season And What’s Next For The AMC+ Original

One of the true great surprise series of 2022 is that of AMC’s Pantheon. The first truly legit answer to Japan’s domination in animated drama, we had a chance to talk to the series’ director straight from Titmouse, the legendary Juno Lee, on how the show came to be, challenges through COVID, and what’s next for the franchise.

John Schwarz: Titmouse has such a great reputation in the business taking on projects. What made the studio wanna chase after and produce Pantheon?

Juno Lee: Well, I mean there’s two answers. I guess. There’s one for Titmouse and one personally for me. I think they overlap quite a bit. But as you know, Titmouse as a studio, we like to do all kinds of different things. If you look at our studio resume, it’s pretty varied, you know what I mean? We’ll work on children’s shows all the way up to gnarly Adult Swim stuff and everything in between.

 So we like diversity, we like things that are different. We just don’t like to work on the same thing for 10 years. Then number two, I mean it’s a challenge when AMC came to us with this idea, they were throwing around names like Satoshi-kon and stuff, and we were giddy inside, but at the same time terrified cuz you’re dropping names like that.

It’s super high end feature films outta Japan. Those are the folks that we look up to and admire their work. And they came to us, us, they’re AMC, so they’ve never really, they’re not known for doing animation, they’re known for doing dramas. So when they came to us, it was a surprise, a pleasant one. And then when we read what this was about, Craig Silverstein, our showrunner when he was pitching the idea, I was just like, this isn’t good. This is never gonna get picked up. Cause too good to be true. You know what I mean? It’s all the stuff that I’ve been waiting for. Anyway, just the fact that we could use animation just as a medium not any different from live-action. You know? I mean, no one ever questions live action shows. Why is this live-action?

Everyone understands live action could be for kids or adults or whatever, what have you. It’s just the medium. It’s just the vehicle for telling the story. But for, as you might already know, for such a long time animation in the States anyway, has been labeled for kids. If not, it’s primetime comedy stuff when they say adult animation, which is cool. I love all that stuff, but why not? Other things too. But I think we’re getting there. I think yeah, we’re starting to see with Pantheon as well as things like Love, Death and Robots we’re showing that animation could be used to tell other kinds of stories. And not necessarily adult animation because it’s violent or gratuitous or whatever, but just heady sci-fi could be done in animation as well.

Anime coming to the States isn’t a new thing.  So how did you approach Pantheon as both a series infused with Japanese-DNA, but it not being anime.

Well, here’s the thing, the term anime, it’s animation outta Japan which we are all fans of. We grew up watching all of that. But I think more and more the world is becoming almost a homogenous thing where all the artists that are growing up now, if you’re into animation, you’re into an, it’s just no other true. So it’s whatever you’re influenced by. So stuff coming outta Europe, stuff coming out of Japan and the homegrown stuff, it feels like, especially animation, it, it’s kind of melding together all there. It’s really hard to see. Well, not really hard to see, but the delineation between that, the styles are breaking down more and more.

Back in the eighties and nineties when I was a kid, anime looked like anime, then nothing else looked like anime. Years later we have all of this cross-polinization So when Pantheon came across our desk, stylistically speaking, the showrunner and all the exacts, the references that they had in their heads were outta Japan. Cuz frankly the ones who’ve been dealing with subject matter this, he brought up Summer Wars, he brought up Ghost in the Shell, all that stuff. And for better or worse, it’s all outta Japan. So that’s where the reference points were. Number two, stylistically we tried different things when we started, we tried to go a little more I guess, for lack of a better term, a little more graphic with the style, meaning not as realistic, but just trying some other stuff. Maybe a little more influence from French sort of things.

But I think our showrunner had a pretty clear idea. He didn’t want the style to get in the way of the story. Does that make sense? If it was really ground breakingly, fresh looking design wise, it might actually detract cuz we’re supposed to start out grounded and believable. And then, I don’t know how much of the show you’ve seen, but it starts getting crazier and crazier. We need somewhere to go. So it was like we tamped everything down on purpose just kind of recognizable as, okay, these are realistic human beings. That’s about all we needed out of the characters. We didn’t want to go too stylized from the get go. And as far as our influences go, it came from everywhere. Even a lot of it was influenced from, you’ve seen Lastman.

So, it was all kinds of other anime. And then we also had to think about the production pipeline. It has to be something that people can draw, especially in Korea, cuz as it’s a shipping show, so we have to ship to Korea. So it has to be something they’re so somewhat familiar with because of the schedule and just the turnaround time. If it took them nine months just to learn how to draw the characters, I mean, it’s already hard enough just, we just didn’t want to throw a curve ball at anybody. And makes sense as we wear our references our influences on our sleeves on this one.

Titmouse has worked with every network, Netflix, and as you mentioned for Adult Swim. And now here you work with AMC, as you mentioned, not a network known for animation. So what was it like working with them and were there certain freedoms that you guys were able to enjoy that maybe you guys haven’t been able to experience in terms of producing the show?

Absolutely. When I first heard that they’ve never done animation, that strikes fear into most of us going like, Oh man, they’re gonna expect things the live-action way. But on the contrary, they were a pleasure to work with since they came to us saying, hey, you guys are the experts in making animation, so you tell us how it’s done. And that was so refreshing, to say the least. And very early on before we made the show, we did a 10-minute pilot presentation years ago. And even during that time, I think that was a learning time for all of us. For them it was seeing how animation is actually produced and how long it could take. Everyone has to draw everything you see on screen. So there was a learning experience for them, how it went. And then I think we earned a lot of their trust during that time. They knew that we were doing the best that we possibly could to make that pilot look as good as possible. And that carried through to the series where they had a lot of trust in us. Not only us, but Craig, our showrunner. He was the conduit between the worlds. And he did an awesome job. And it’s awesome cuz he’s a big nerd. He’s from live-action, but he loves animation. Some of the references that he’s pulling out, I was like, how do you know that.

He’s watched things like Sword Art Online, you know what I mean? But yeah, he served as an awesome in-between and what he brought from live-action, I think really influenced the show a lot from the get go. We were trying to be as cinematic as possible for a TV show for better or worse. But it was awesome working with AMC. Like you said, Gabe had a lot of trust in us.  So that makes us want to do better.

I’m sure Titmouse wasn’t immune to production delays from Covid 19 and taking on any show is hard enough. Taking on a show where you’re trying to prove the medium, this type of animation belongs here and can do well here. So what was it like trying to get through that and ultimately become successful during the pandemic?

When we first got the news that we we’re got green lit, I was super happy. And then we got the news right away that we’re gonna be doing it from home. And I was like, All right, we’re delaying it. I didn’t think it would be possible, honestly but I guess that’s a testament to our production. Charlie Sweitzer, our line producer, he killed it. Just the amount of organization it would take to just keep everyone on the same page, same boat, week after week. And we’re already almost like two and a half years into production, something like that, with no breaks in between we’re somehow doing it and we’re not, I mean, there’s little slips in getting behind, but we’re managing it and we’re not freaking out just yet. So, I guess that’s a testament to our production and we’ve made it work somehow. It’s hard for me to believe we did, but I mean, I guess we’re doing it every day. Yeah, it’s incredible. And that makes me question, is this the norm? What’s gonna happen now after this?

Cause on our production right now it’s, we’re almost wrapped up. We have a couple months left, so we don’t wanna rock the boat. I guess we could go back in today if we want, but that’s kind of changing ships when you’re almost there. So let’s just get across and then we’ll talk about what’s next.

What is next in terms of the future of the show? 

So, 1-0-8 aired. So we left it at, okay, David’s dead. I guess what the world has fundamentally of changed, there was a nuke that went off. So what now what’s gonna happen? It will show that. And then the stakes get a little bit higher. I guess it goes a little bit beyond our main characters. And then we talk about how this kind of stuff might affect society in general and even out to the species. So without giving too much away, it just gets bigger rather quickly.

Do you guys see Pantheon as a never ending tale? Or do you think there is an ending here? Some anime have the tendency to last for a long time like Naruto and Bleach with 400 episodes. Is this a show where there is an end in sight in terms of wanting to creatively wrap everything?

Think so. From what I know and what I could understand is that there is an end to the Caspian and a Maddie story. Whether or not we could tell more stories in that universe short, I think any story’s open to that.  We haven’t really talked about it, but there is a wrapping for our main characters in this thing. So I don’t think it’s gonna be a 400 episode run

Do you think the show opens up doors for internally, both at now’s and for yourself in terms of the types of stories that now you would like to see me made in terms of maybe it kicks off some ideas for you internally, I mean or the studio itself? What do you think?

I think the studio itself has always been interested in telling stories like this, but it, it’s really more externally showing the powers to be saying the folks with the ability to fund projects saying, yeah, on paper this sounds like it wouldn’t work. And we’re looking at it, we’re like, man, we have sequences where it’s just five minutes of people talking on the phone at each other. What the hell are we supposed to do with that in animation? You know what I mean? We’re doing all these things that you’re not supposed to like hold on a character longer than 10 seconds. At least in TV animation you just don’t do that. But we’re like,F” it, let’s try it. Let’s how far we can push it. So internally, yeah, we’ve always dug things like this, but just hopefully externally, somebody watching can say, yeah, there is an audience for this and people aren’t short as short I guess attention span as one you might think looking at TikTok, not everyone’s like that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.  Pantheon is streaming on AMC+.
Listen to the interview below.