Castlevania producer Adi Shankar is ‘one of us’ – Interview

In this short, Jane’s character resists the strong urge to fight the crime the police are ignoring, happening just in earshot. The short’s climax is an eruption of intense, graphic violence and morally questionable vengeance. In other words, it’s the Punisher we got a hint of in 2004 and had been waiting for ever since. The short was written by Chad St. John and directed by Phil Joanou, but Shankar produced and presented it. It became the first film in what he would dub the Bootleg Universe.

That was the first thing that came up when Shankar and I chatted. As professional, polished, and intentional as it feels, Shankar and the others were in some very uncharted territory.

“That was such a crazy short,” Shankar told me. “I made it, and then I didn’t know what to do with it. I was like, Tom, what do we do with this?”

“I don’t know, pal,” Jane said – or at least that’s how Shankar remembers it, completely with an imitation of Jane’s voice. “You’re the guy who uses the internet, so you figure it out.”

That spawned the YouTube channel where all these Bootleg shorts sit these days, and the idea behind ‘Dirty Laundry’ stuck with Shankar so thoroughly that he, for a while, thought about remaking it in India. Well, he didn’t just think about it.

“I literally almost remade [it],” he said. “I thought, you take that exact same plotline and it goes from being about… what ‘Dirty Laundry’ is about… to all of a sudden being a snapshot of wealth disparity. Everyone is so scrunched together, and you have massive poverty, but at the same time, you’d have… a street in India where you have massive poverty, and then a Mercedes will drive by. People have their windows up and blinders on as if nothing is going on.”

Shankar had been talking with at least one noteworthy Indian actor and a potential director. This wasn’t just a fleeting fancy, but something he was actively trying to make happen.

While he was working on that, though, Shankar was also working on another one of his Bootleg Universe shorts, and when that dropped, everything changed.

“Once ‘Power/Rangers‘ came out… it went from being the whole Bootleg Universe being this fun little thing I did… these passion projects, to all of a sudden CNN is writing about me making fan films. It made the whole thing weird… weirdly official,” Shankar said. “I felt like a bank robber who had too much heat on him.”

No more jobs for a while, Shankar decided. Time to go official.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/07/31/adi-shankar-interview-castlevania-dredd-punisher/