Adi Shankar or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust My Instincts
“Castlevania” producer is working on more big videogame adaptations, but he’s also working on himself, with a little help from Kanye West, while crafting his directorial debut, “The Guardians of Justice,” which starts streaming on Netflix early next year.
Adi Shankar is done fighting his instincts. And his universe is about to get a lot more animated because of it.
The 36-year-old filmmaker has produced movies starring Brad Pitt, Liam Neeson, Mark Wahlberg and Carl Urban, but he’s better known these days as the mastermind behind Netflix hit Castlevania. The anime-style action series holds the distinction of being one of the few videogame adaptations to ever please fans of the source material, as well as critics. The fourth and final season is sitting pretty with a 100 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But more importantly, people keep watching. As a result, more companies want to be in business with the very busy creator, who previously raised eyebrows in Hollywood by wearing KISS-like makeup to movie premieres, and infuriating studio executives with his ultra-violent, unauthorized “Bootleg Universe.” The gritty YouTube short films adapted iconic IP without permission from the rights holders. Marvel’s The Punisher, Power Rangers, James Bond, and even Mr. Rogers are among the pop culture figures that got a Shankar shakeup.
Marvel and Saban never came knocking. Or if they did, it was probably to serve a cease and desist. But the video game industry welcomed him with open arms. “I have and continue to be in conversations with most companies,” he says. Ubisoft, one of the biggest game producers on the planet, trusted him with their library of intellectual property. Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, an animé series based on the company’s popular first-person shooter Far Cry 3, is coming to Netflix later this year. More recently, KRAFTON announced that Shankar will create an animated project based on the hit PUBG: Battlegrounds universe.
“You’re watching in real time, me evolving as a storyteller,” he tells me over the phone one morning in June. “I spent a lot of time fighting my instincts.”
Shankar is a rare type of producer in Hollywood. He’s gotten more press than some of the movie stars he’s worked with over the years, and up until recently, presented himself to the public as more of a leather-clad rock star, or perhaps, a larger-than-life comic book character. Whether viewed as a hero or villain, his persona has always had more in common with a professional wrestler than a producer. The latter typically wear suit-and-tie attire, or if they’re really hip, business casual. Adi Shankar has a flaming fist and orange eyes in his current Facebook profile pic, which 62,000 people follow. But lately, he ditched the makeup. And actually, he ditched Hollywood, too.
Shankar has been calling me once a week over the summer from Dubai, his pandemic headquarters, where he’s been enjoying time with family, and deep personal introspection. “Life is very precious but lifestyle isn’t,” he shared with his followers on Facebook in July. “A better life is not in the car that you drive, a better life comes from the way you are within yourself. And that way inner harmony can’t be purchased.”
Gratitude has become the eccentric filmmaker’s attitude since leaving Los Angeles last September. Is he coming back? “I don’t know,” he tells me.
And it doesn’t look like he has to, either. His career is hotter than ever, and he is positioned to become a geek god, if the culture embraces his forthcoming projects in the same way they embraced Castlevania and his most viral Bootleg Universe shorts, like the Joseph Kahn-directed POWER/RANGERS and The Punisher: Dirty Laundry, which famously features actor Thomas Jane reprising his role as the Marvel antihero.
“I want to contribute to nerd culture in a meaningful fucking way,” he proclaims. “That’s what inspired me, that’s what I care about. I’m OK with playing in that sandbox.”
It’s the traditional Hollywood sandbox that Shankar grew weary of.
“The mindset of Hollywood machine back then was stay in your lane. We’re making a product here, and the product has to fit into a box,” he says. “I think it’s pretty well documented that I had frustrations with the Hollywood ecosystem, as it existed previously. Even though, in a lot of ways, I was a beneficiary of the system.”
Before embracing animation, he became a major industry player in his early 20s by producing live-action films The Grey, Lone Survivor, Killing Them Softly, Dredd, and A Walk Among the Tombstones, to the name a few. His last live-action feature, battle rap comedy Bodied, was among the funniest offerings of 2018, but couldn’t get much attention because few distributors would touch it due to its hard-R social commentary on race, through the lens of a privileged white Ivy League college kid learning the underground art form.
Although he’s on the cusp of reigning over an animated empire of beloved video game adaptations, we’re not really talking much about those projects in any of these calls. Shankar’s got another big move on his mind: a career as a director.
One of Hollywood’s most eccentric producers is preparing to release his strangest project yet, The Guardians of Justice — an apocalyptic, cyberpunk superhero drama starring professional wrestler Diamond Dallas Page as Nighthawk, a Batman-like caped crusader investigating the apparent suicide of this universe’s Superman equivalent, Marvelous Man — an archetype refreshingly played by Asian-American actor Will Yun Lee — who kills himself on television in front of the world he spent decades saving.
It’s a thought-provoking introduction to the mixed-media production: seven episodes combining campy live-action with Shankar’s signature blend of bloody violence, as well as hyper-active animation, inspired by the ’90s fighting games like Mortal Kombat, Saturday morning cartoons, animé, comic books, and a treasure trove of other stylish Easter eggs. Geek culture will likely appreciate all of the winks and nods to Shankar’s childhood influences, but neither of us can say for sure with confidence. While Guardians of Justice follows the reliable Hollywood blueprint of being “same but different,” it is wildly unorthodox when compared to even the most subversive superhero hits out there, like The Boys and Watchmen. “And that was intentional,” Shankar says.
“There is a version where I could have gone out and gotten a DP from Fast and Furious, try to make this with Bruce Willis and Idris Elba and Clive Owen, or something like that. Make it within the confines of the sandboxed parameters of either the Hollywood system or the Hollywood independent system,” he adds. “I was trying to go for something unique on every level, including the way it was cast.”
The casting was done in concert with casting director Carmen Aiello, as well as through calls or texts to friends he’s worked with over the years. Sharni Vinson (You’re Next) plays female lead The Speed alongside Derek Mears (Swamp Thing) as romantically insecure Awesome Man. WWE star John Hennigan brings the bullet time as America’s #1 super soldier, Jane Seymour (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) camps it up as villain Addison Walker, and Hal Ozsan (Jessica Jones) portrays TV news anchor Van Dawson, who ties the narrative together.
Five years after principal photography, they’re all still waiting to see the finished product, which has been something of an odyssey for Shankar to finish. “I was just trying to make something, and the universe kept pushing me in the direction of making it more weird, and more and more eccentric,” he says.
Ozsan, who is a screenwriter as well as an actor with 76 credits, tells me Shankar may have “single-handedly invented abstract expressionism in television” with this project.
“I don’t think anyone involved quite knew how it was going to come together, except for Adi,” he continues. “He understands art on a quantum level that I don’t think the rest of us are capable of perceiving. We’re all still so stuck in art we’ve seen before, the way other people have made art, [and] the way other people think about art; I think the guy is an entire dimension of space-time further along than anyone involved with the project.”
Ozsan and the rest of the cast will finally understand their director’s vision when Guardians of Justice starts streaming on Netflix in early 2022, if they haven’t already seen the final cut, which premiered last month in competition at CANNESSERIES, one of the world’s most prestigious television festivals. Although the series didn’t take home any awards, Shankar tells me over our last call that the audience full of industry insiders welcomed Guardians with appreciation and applause. It was the conclusion of a six-and-a-half-year creative process, which included producing two very different versions.
After Castlevania was released in 2017, he showed an executive at Netflix an entirely live-action version of Guardians. “Which clearly was not what I was trying to do. I just wanted to get it done, you know?” Shankar recalls. “He was like, ‘Look man, now you’ve got a big hit under your belt. Is this what you want to follow it up with?’ I thought about it, and called him up, and said no, it’s not. Not even close. So, I tore the whole thing apart and restarted.”
The journey that followed shaped him into the man he is today. And he credits Kanye West for helping him get here.
A former Marvel executive introduced the two in 2018 because the music producer wanted to start making movies. That collaboration never materialized. However, Shankar did briefly have an office at Yeezy headquarters, enjoyed hanging out with another eccentric creator, and ultimately, learned a lot about artistry. “He gave me the codes,” Shankar says, and refers to West as a coach and a mentor.
“I saw the way that he frustrated people, and I realized I frustrated people in the same way. Because, it’s hard to communicate things that don’t exist.”
So, what are the codes transmitted by Coach Kanye West?
“Don’t fight your instincts,” Shankar explains. And a more specific example: “I have to have a complete disregard for all the artists that worked for me and with me on the show. I don’t mean that in a harsh way. But if my vision is to have a VHS filter over this whole fucking show, so that it looks like a lost videotape from the 1980s, it kind of doesn’t matter what my DP thinks.”
“I was waiting for permission in a weird way,” he continues. And hearing Kanye talk about flying Sir Paul McCartney in to record a verse for 2018 track All Day, only to cut the rock icon’s contribution to a five-second hook, was all the permission Shankar needed to finally stop holding back and get weird.
What followed was eight months of visual effects and editing work assembling his directorial debut into its current form. “And basically praying that they all work together in a way that was coherent,” Shankar adds.
The Guardians of Justice finally crystallized into something he was comfortable sharing with the world in early 2020. But the odyssey of Adi Shankar wasn’t just about directing a TV show. He conceived the project back in 2014 while dealing with severe depression. “I was just chronically unhappy. Like, on an extreme level. And I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me,” he says.
Viewers will soon see that very relatable feeling manifested in the entire premise of the show. What happens when Earth’s greatest hero, an invincible super man, kills himself?
Shankar’s odyssey started in a dark place, but it has a happy ending. Or rather, a bright new beginning, because, unlike the movies, life is a continuous series of frames. While reflecting on the formative frames of the last decade, Shankar describes the entire process as “more than therapeutic.”
“It was me posing a problem, and then figuring out how to solve it,” he says. The problem, as I gather in hours of conversation, can be boiled down to this premise: Who is Adi Shankar?
It’s a question we all have to ask about ourselves as we ebb and flow through the never-ending story of becoming what we are. And even in death, that story continues to take shape, because our lives and our work will continue to reverberate through time in ways we’ll never comprehend, or even imagine, while standing this close to the canvas. Maybe we are the canvas. And each moment we live is another frame in the major motion picture event of eternity.
But for right now, in this frame, Adi Shankar appears to have acquired newfound peace and harmony in his life.
I could dig through my notes for a quote that exemplifies this, but I happen see one right in front of me, on Shankar’s Facebook feed, accompanied by a picture of the artist looking refreshingly normal. No makeup. No flames. Just a man looking up at the sky after learning he’s been trusted to adapt another huge video game property for fans that love it.
“Got some big news yesterday that feels like the culmination of my journey ’til now as an eccentric artist,” he writes while teasing the PUBG news. “What brought me the most joy, however, was sharing the good news with my team and seeing the reactions on their faces. The old me would have gotten an ego boost, the new me is just grateful.
“My takeaway: Keep going because hard work pays off and is accelerated by humility.”
That’s some good advice. I think I’ll take it, coach.
Take a look at exclusive character posters for the next Adi Shankar experience, “The Guardians of Justice,” below.
