From Outsider to Headliner: Castlevania’s Adi Shankar On Fan Films, Creative Freedom With Captain Laserhawk, and Gameboy-punk

For quite a while, film and television adaptations of videogames were considered bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment, with a long line of maligned B-movies that sent fans of the source material running for the hills. However, this narrative has largely shifted, and between the response to recent releases like Netflix’s Arcane or HBO’s The Last of Us, it’s fair to say that this long-standing curse has (mostly) been expunged.

One of the first shows that helped buck this trend was 2017’s animated Castlevania series, which was executive produced and co-run by Adi Shankar. He’s gone from an industry outsider who worked on popular R-rated fan films to a nerd culture ambassador tasked with a wide array of videogame adaptations, including the upcoming Assassin’s Creed, Devil May Cry, and PUBG shows, as well as the recently released Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix. We got a chance to talk with Shankar about his journey from butting heads with rightsholders to finding projects that gave him the creative freedom he had been seeking.

Note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Paste Magazine: One of your earlier projects was the Bootleg Universe, which was a series of fan films that reimagined properties like The Punisher or Power Rangers. Could you tell us how that came to be and what made you interested in creating parodies and satire about pop culture?

Adi Shankar: First of all, I had no idea that this was unconventional. This is just what I wanted to do, and I was trying to do it officially. One of the earliest examples is I wanted to make a Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson-meets-David Fincher style piece on Richie Rich. In this vision, Richie Rich was in a quarter-life crisis, and in this universe, the cartoon that we all watched as a kid, or were at least aware of, was bankrolled by his parents. They had this glamorized version of his life that everyone would watch, and it made him super famous, but not in a pleasant way. It was kind of like how some parents dress up their kids in costumes and take photos. This was the trillionaire version of that. And so, it was a quarter-life crisis movie about him trying to find an identity outside of the one grafted onto him in a world where he didn’t really have the tools to navigate. And I wanted Macaulay Culkin to play Richie Rich again.

So that’s just one idea, but I had so many of these pitches. And then I would sit down with the rightsholder, and they would always say no. That’s just one case, and I can repeat example after example, but it became clear to me that I was never going to get anywhere close to pop culture IP. And if I did get close to pop culture IP, it would have to be executed in a way that emulated what was in vogue at that moment. So, the Bootleg Universe was a rebellion. It was a rebellion against IP holders and conventional ways of telling stories, and it was also a rebellion against the distribution apparatus that governed what got made, who got to make it, and what it had to look like.

Paste: So, at the time, you felt you couldn’t tell the stories you wanted to within the confines of what the rightsholders wanted, and you decided to do the Bootleg Universe instead?

Shankar: Yeah, it was exactly that. These IPs came with guardrails, but they weren’t creatively minded guardrails, they were more fear-based. It was like a bunch of McKinsey douchebags who’d run a portfolio analysis and be like, “This is what this intellectual property means,” and you’d say, “What the fuck is this shit? This is nonsense, this isn’t right.” But some McKinsey douchebags would get paid a lot to concoct this nonsense. And then there’s a trickle-down effect where this cultural iconography is literally in prison.

Because when you look at something like Batman, why did it survive? Because they had strict guardrails? No, the reality is if you go to every decade, that means a completely different character. You get one version of Batman, and then Frank Miller comes on and does The Dark Knight Returns. Batman is a character that has been reinvented through the generations, and he’s been malleable because of that reinvention. I would also argue that one of the things that really helped Batman was you had a series of artists who were fans who grew up loving it and then re-envisioned it.

Paste: You’ve produced many live-action films, but in recent years, you’ve focused on animated works. What draws you to animation as a storytelling medium?

Shankar: So, I didn’t grow up in America. I was born in India, then I lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, and then moved to the US by myself when I was 15. So, one piece of it is that animation is just so prevalent in other parts of the world. In other areas, people aren’t like, “I’m not a kid anymore, so I don’t watch cartoons. I only watch live-action movies.” To me, it was weird that watching cartoons disappeared in the West as you got older, whereas elsewhere, you didn’t have that. In other places, you get more YA-oriented animation and really mature, adult-oriented animation, so as a medium, it ages with you. Whereas in the US, it’s just kind of like, “Boom, alright, you’re done.” That said, I don’t want to knock American animation because you had series like Batman: The Animated Series or X-Men: The Animated Series that had very adult themes. But overall, I grew up having a strong cultural awareness that watching animation didn’t have to end when you got older.

The other thing I would say is that I think in cartoons, and when I play back my memories or imagine things in the future, I’m not always envisioning them in live action. Sometimes, there are cartoon sound effects or anime-style movements. It can feel like I’m experiencing hyperreality where it doesn’t have the locked-off, steady pace of a sitcom. Sometimes, I feel like I’m experiencing life through the lens of anime, animation, and kinetic hyperreality. Something I realized fairly recently is that there’s this consensus reality that I’m not experiencing. I’m experiencing something else, and whatever that something else is, it ends up being like animation, or at least something that feels closer to animation than to live action.

Paste: Related to some of the animation you’ve been involved with recently, Castlevania: Nocturne came out a few weeks ago. I’m a big fan of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which the show is loosely based on. While the storytelling in that game is relatively sparse, this made room for Nocturne to take departures that I enjoyed and took me by surprise. As a creator, do you like it when you’re adapting from games or any other media that offers more room for interpretation when adapting their stories? Or do you prefer if there’s more existing material to work with?

Shankar: So to answer your question, not about Castlevania specifically, but more generally about Captain Laserhawk and everything else before it, I feel like one of my strengths is as a story writer. Figuring out the story is one of the parts of the process that I really enjoy. So, it’s not just about nailing down the premise, like we’re doing Power Rangers, but it’s hard R, for example, it’s figuring out everything else. Because when you figure out the story, you’re also figuring out the tone, the vibe, and the big-picture interpretation of the piece.

If you want to see the other extreme of it, let’s look at an adaptation of a book. A book lays out the characters, the world, and tells you in a nuanced way what the story is. If you’re going to adopt it into TV or film, you have to figure out how to actually adapt it, and you can’t say, “Oh, okay, that’s cool, but I’m just gonna tell another thing.” That pisses people off. I don’t need to dunk on anybody, but we can list example after example of people who have attempted to do that. If you do, the audience is like, “Dude, what the fuck?”

So overall, honestly, I don’t think I have a preference. But, I will say this, it’s easy to cynically look at my short films and all my work and say, “Oh, he’s just taking the thing and making it dark.” I don’t know if anyone’s even saying that because I don’t read this stuff, but it’s easy to be cynical and say that is the blueprint, you know? The reality is that I’m only approaching things if I’m a fan. In anything, even if I’m not as involved or running the ship, I’m only getting involved if I’m a fan. And as a fan, you know that not every project and every IP is the same. And if you don’t love it, you’re not going to understand how to work with it. It’s got to start from the vibration of love. That’s the answer. If you love it, then you’re going to know how to get other people to love it.

Because at the end of the day, I feel like good art tells you something about yourself. Otherwise, if it says something like, “These people are bad, and kids, after you watch this show, go beat them up in the street,” then it’s propaganda. Good art tells you something about yourself and gives people a language to connect. It’s like a bridge that can get people to communicate. It may seem like two people have nothing in common, but often, they actually like the same things, and the feeling they get from the thing they already enjoy is the same feeling the other person gets from their favorite thing. A lot of the time, there’s actually a lot of overlap, and if you make them see that, you have a shared cultural language you can communicate through.

Paste: Your newest show, Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, just released. It seems to take place in a dystopian cyberpunk-styled world. What made you want to tell a story in this setting?

Shankar: So, actually, I would say it’s not cyberpunk. When you look at cyberpunk, that’s William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell, or Cyberpunk 2077, for instance. I would argue that we created a new sub-genre of cyberpunk called Gameboy-punk.

Paste: Could you elaborate on that?

Shankar: Well, if you look at Captain Laserhawk’s world, it’s one where video game peripherals inform the design aesthetic. For instance, Alex’s rocket launcher in Episode 3 looks like the Nintendo Super Scope. So, when you look at classic cyberpunk, the aesthetic choices that construct the world are there to oppress the human spirit. Eden is very much a video game universe, and this is a narrative told within a video game-feeling universe.

Paste: Similar to the Bootleg Universe, Captain Laserhawk has many reinterpretations of preexisting characters, in this case, those from Ubisoft games. With fandom on the rise, many are very particular about how their favorite characters are portrayed. What’s your process for thinking up your versions of these characters, and do you ever worry about how fans will respond to your reinterpretations?

Shankar: I only get involved with things if I love it. Because if I love it, there’s a vibration of love that allows me to reimagine and reinterpret, right? It comes from love versus shock or exploitation, and that vibration of love is contagious. If you’re asking me about my actual process, I just see it. It’s not an intellectual process; I just see it and then write down what I see. In a way, I’m saying it’s not really a choice, if that makes sense? I’m just transcribing exactly what I’m seeing, feeling, and hearing.

Paste: You previously mentioned that when pitching story ideas, rightsholders were very particular about how they wanted their properties portrayed, and this led you to create the Bootleg Universe instead of working with them directly. What was it like to officially work with videogame publisher Ubisoft for Captain Laserhawk? Did you ever experience pushback about how you were depicting their characters?

Shankar: Zero pushback. It was complete love and support. And honestly, the group I worked with, Ubisoft Motion Picture, Film, and Television, fostered such a safe environment for me to create this. It was the opposite of every experience I’d had that led me to make the Bootleg Universe. It was a completely collaborative and supportive process that didn’t feel like a weird negotiation. And if any other artists came to me and said, “Hey, man, how are they to work with?” I’d say to work with them. They will support you, and they’ll cultivate you. And you’ll come out the other end better at your craft because of it.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves videogames, film, and creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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