Interviews
The Mind Behind ‘The Guardians of Justice’: An Interview With Adi Shankar – Part 2
Welcome back to part-two of my interview with Adi Shankar, creator, producer, writer, and director on The Guardians of Justice (which made its debut at Cannes this week and will release on Netflix next year). Though the show takes shape in the form of a superhero narrative, its scope goes beyond that of generic superhero storytelling. GoJ is everything from a murder mystery to that of a political satire, weaving together a plethora of wild and intriguing characters. If you happened to have missed part-one of the interview, you can read that here.
Enhancing the narrative is the show’s brilliant use of visual stylization, the show morphing overtime to display an acid-like frenzy of violence and animation. One sequence may start out in live action, only to change into 8-bit aesthetics, then shifting into Claymation, to then end in a first-person shooter like style – all of that and more taking place within just a couple minutes.
In the second part of my interview with Shankar, we discuss the visual direction behind GoJ; the decision in creating the show this way and including so many styles, as well as how that flow and editing reflect the creator’s own thought process. We also discuss what it has been like to see the show develop over time, where it fits among his Bootleg Universe, his work in animation, and what Shankar looks forward to in the future.
Michael Pementel: When writing the story, were you actively imagining scenes in a particular visual style?
Adi Shankar: I think sometimes, for my personal creative process, I’ll be thinking of four different things. I’ll be thinking of a visual style and a character; it’s literally four disparate things, four different projects. Then all of a sudden you wake up one day and realize that it is all the same project. Really early on, the story was originally designed to be told in a vlog format; it literally was going to be people sitting and talking into the camera. I knew the broad strokes of the story I wanted to tell. I thought a vlog series was the way to get this out really quickly, but obviously, the project expanded. […] I had a note of all these different art styles I was seeing on the internet. I knew I wanted to do something that cross pollinated mediums. Though, I am not one of those kinds of people who loses sight of the story to have “epic visuals.”
If you’re telling an epic story about a world in chaos, and you’re doing it in a classical filmmaking style, I think you’re missing a point. The audience should feel chaotic while their watching it. Not, “Oh wow this is a very pristine, eloquently told story about the world.” Many different artists from all over the world brought so much to this.
[How all these visual styles play out] is what it’s like to live inside my head.MP: Can you speak a little more to that?
AS: People who know me well [and see this], would be like, “Wow this feels like I’m having a conversation with you.” In interviews sometimes, people will say, “Man you take these long pauses, you stop talking;” that’s not because I’m not thinking, it’s because there’s literally a thousand things that have happened in my head that I cannot verbalize. I’m more in control of [that thought process now], so it isn’t as crazy and chaotic, but that’s how it used to me. So [when it comes to the array of visuals and editing style within GoJ], that isn’t a choice I made, I just don’t understand why every other product isn’t made this way.
Movies and TV shows – and I understand I’m not in the norm here – but they move too slow for me. When I watch things, I feel like not enough things happen. That’s why the pacing of the show is what it is; it isn’t normal pacing. The [pacing is reflective] of how I consume information.
MP: What was it like seeing this show evolve overtime and creating the next entry in your Bootleg Universe?
AS: There was a Sam, Ken, and Graham – obviously I didn’t do this all myself, there was a team – they would say that I would just sort of stare at the screen and just keep going, “That’s so crazy.” I didn’t understand what I was doing before, and I think maybe now I have more clarity, in terms of initially creating the Bootleg Universe and GoJ. In my head, all I thought I was doing was figuring out how to make things cheaply. It only clicked for me pretty recently that’s not at all what I was trying to do. I just never believed that a corporate entity would ever give me the resources necessary to execute a vision on a big scale. I was constantly approaching things in a way like, “How do we make it now? How do we make it cheap?”
With GoJ, I think you can draw a direct line to this from the Bootleg Universe fan films; it was really like, “Hey how do I do one of these things bigger, longer, and just do it.” So, it was the same kind of path for me emotionally as those films.
MP: What’s it like reflecting on your work with the Bootleg Universe now?
AS: It’s interesting because if someone had gone back in time now and talked to me back in 2012, and been like, “Dude what you’re actually doing is coming up with really interesting ways to do stuff and interesting stories around a known IP,” had someone explained that to me, I’d probably had done a hell of a lot more of that. I had a notebook full of ideas; I had a Green Lantern one, a Captain Planet, an Alf idea. I would write them out and think, how do you make this? I didn’t know how to make them then. If someone had had that conversation with me, they would have said, “Dude you’re making these art projects.”
MP: Given all the work you’ve done, what draws you to a project?
AS: […] I’m just trying to generate my own content. Not in a control freak kind of way. I think it’s clear when you see the show, see the body of work that came before it, that there’s a guy with a point of view. What’s great about the point of view is that it can be imprinted onto anything. Literally anything. You can put it in a 1950s gumshoe story, you can put it into heroes. I need creative latitude to imprint my work with a point of view, because I’m not really interested – nor have the skillset – to make vapid content that just entertains but doesn’t say anything. I don’t know how to do that well. So it has to say something and I gotta be in control of what I’m saying.
There have been so many years of struggling with – what is my voice? What am I trying to say? Why am I trying to say this? You eventually figure it out; life is a continual process of figuring that out. I don’t think things draw me to a project, I think projects just start happening. That’s the best way to describe it.
MP: A lot of your prominent work as of recently – and what you have in the pipeline – is animation based. Is that intentional? Is animation something you want to solely stick with moving forward? How has your experience with GoJ changed your approach to craft?
AS: I’m getting back into live action, but more importantly – live action is now starting to emulate animation. At least in the way it’s made. […] In terms of narrative scope, with animation, you are only limited by your imagination. Versus live action which, until pretty recently, you were restricted/limited by your budget. Big movies look a certain way, small movies look a different way. Animation is just a medium to tell a story, and while the art quality, style, and shots may vary depending on budget, the scale of the story can be the same.
I just feel like, given where I was at in my life over the last few years, animation was the right medium for me. Five years from now, I see myself existing in live action, animation, and video games simultaneously.
I knew how to direct, but I didn’t direct before [GoJ]. [Through this project], it wasn’t as simple as [directing] actors on a stage; I was learning how to direct in live action, CGI, Claymation, 2D animation. So I walked away from the project with a baseline skillset that has now gave me the tools to create stuff that is mixed media or exists within a couple of those mediums, or one.
MP: After all your work on GoJ, how are you feeling now that its release is near?
AS: Well, it took over six years to make it, so that’s a huge weight off my shoulders. Part of this project came about because I was incredibly clinically depressed. This show kind of helped me get healthy; it was like a transmutative process. I didn’t start the show as the guy who finished the show. […] It’s not like I went through this experience, got healthy and then made this as a result of that – I had this experience and started making the show during it. Making this was like the worst experience of my life, but it also involved some of my best memories. When I look back on it in 10 years, I’m going to be happy that I went through it.
I would like to thank Adi Shankar for his time regarding these interviews. Keep a look out for updates on The Guardians of Justice as they arrive!
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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