In 2009, François Descraques launched “The visitor from the future” on the web. Four seasons, three mangas, a comic strip, a novel, and 45 million views later, the film adaptation, in feature film, is released in French-speaking cinemas.
“The visitor from the future” is a science fiction comedy in the third degree which tells how a man (Florent Dorin) living in the year 2555 returns to our time to avoid the explosion of a nuclear power plant, responsible for the destruction of the planet in the future. To do this, he kidnaps a politician (Arnaud Ducret) ready to sign for the construction of the plant and his daughter (Enya Baroux), a climate activist. But a mysterious temporal brigade responsible for avoiding any disruption of the time chain tries to thwart the plans of the visitor from the future.
The film asserts itself as an environmental fable coupled with a generational drama between a father and his daughter, the true thread of the feature film, all embellished with multiple leaps in time, a destroyed Paris, a cloud radioactive and enraged zombies…
Homemade special effects, totally delirious concept, the result is generous, funny and even touching at times. The director François Descraques compensates by his creativity and his madness for a limited budget of four million euros.
>> To see: the trailer for the film “The visitor from the future”
A self-contained, mainstream story
Since its French release three weeks ago, “The visitor from the future” has carved out a great success in French cinemas with more than 280,000 admissions. However, there was a risk in making a feature film when cinemas are going through a lasting crisis. “I’m old enough to have grown up with cinema and not the internet, so it was a dream for me to make a film one day, explains the director to RTS. When we started making the series on the internet, it is because we weren’t wanted on TV or in the movies.”
To go from a web series to a film, François Descraques had to do a lot of writing work: “We knew we had a concept that might give a great show, he explains. I had to do at the same time a film which is part of the continuity of the series, but which is not at all limited to references of the series I took three or four years to write the good history and to find the good scenario. I had to adapt my universe as if I hadn’t written the series.”
>> To listen: the interview with François Descraques in Vertigo
François Descraques suffered a lot of refusals before being able to make his film. With his crazy side, the director is part of this generation who wants to offer something new. “What I learned in cinema is that you don’t have to make a film with everyone for everyone. You have to find the right people, the right allies and when you have them found, you have to work with them. It’s much nicer than trying to convince people who aren’t interested in what you’re doing anyway”, concludes the director.
Interview by Rafael Wolf
Adaptation web: ld
“The visitor from the future” to see from September 28 in French-speaking cinemas.
All four seasons of the series are available on Youtube. The comic “L’Élu des Dieux” drawn by Gosh takes place between seasons 1 and 2. The novel “La Meute” written by Slimane-Baptiste Berhoun includes flashbacks to the Visitor’s childhood. The perspective of the Temporal Brigade can be discovered in the three manga volumes drawn by Guillaume Lapeyre and Alexandre Desmassias.
