‘Meanwhile on Earth’ Director Jérémy Clapin Finds the Common Thread Between Space and the Past in Live-Action Debut

Animator/director Jérémy Clapin (the Oscar-nominated “I Lost My Body”) makes his live-action feature debut with the French sci-fi drama “Meanwhile on Earth.” It concerns Elsa (Megan Northam), the grieving sister of an astronaut lost in space, Franck (Sébastien Pouderoux), who’s unable to move on with her life. But she receives a ray of hope when an alien contacts her with a dark proposal for her brother’s safe return.

For Clapin, “Meanwhile on Earth” was an opportunity to explore his fascination with outer space via the theme of loss. Live-action provided a new means of expressing his surreal sensibility. Elsa’s painful journey is depicted as both reality and imagination. She works in a hospice, drawing pictures of the patients as an aspiring graphic novelist, but retreats inside her head, where her brother is still with her. For this, the director incorporated black-and-white animated sequences in which Elsa and Franck are on a space mission together.

“I had a fascination with space because we are always looking to this territory where we cannot reach,” Clapin told IndieWire. “It’s like the same relationship we have when we look into the past or something we cannot reach, like the future or the world of the ghost, the dead people. So I started with something very universal about this frustration and the story came to be about loss. I don’t have a lot of experience about grieving, I still have my parents, but I’m very scared about facing this thing that’s going to happen.”

While Clapin trapped Elsa between the living and the dead, he made her the ghost. “She’s not anymore on Earth,” he said. “When she lost her brother, she lost her sense of gravity. And all the mixed genres of the film are a representation of her. It is her obsession to make the difference between what is fake, what is true, what is phantasm, what is everything.”

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The alien serves as a voice in Elsa’s head that articulates her indifference toward everyone around her: the elderly, the sick, the homeless. There’s even a brutal scene of body horror. “Society doesn’t know how to deal with that most of the time,” Clapin continued. “And we have seen this during the COVID episode. Also, when we have to choose between saving young life or older life when we don’t have the resources to save everyone.”

Visually, Clapin wanted to depict a purgatory for Elsa with rich imagery of architecture, a forest, and outer space. Which is why the film is framed with corridors. “I wanted to meld all this territory together,” he added. “And I wanted from the beginning to mix live-action and animation and have them face each other: reality and imagination.”

The hand-drawn animation (an homage to the late ’70s “Captain Future” anime series) was handled by Xilam Animation (“I Lost My Body”), run by the film’s producer Marc du Pontavice. Four sequences comprising seven minutes tell a parallel story in which Elsa views herself as an alien, done in black-and-white to contrast the live-action.

“I wanted the animation to be storytelling from the soul perspective, and more restricted in its framing,” said Clapin. “We see the two of them having fun flying, and then there’s one in the middle, where she talks with her brother, and then we feel like we are in a ghost spaceship, where there is only two souls, the brother and the sister. And the last part, Elsa has a choice to make and saying a kind of goodbye.”

The animation process is very intimate for Clapin: a mix of fantasy, memory, and magic. “You start with a still frame, and then you give the illusion of life by adding another one, another one,” he added. “And, actually, this is what Elsa is doing. She’s trying to keep her brother alive by imagination, drawing next to other drawings, continuing to live through animation.”

“Meanwhile on Earth” is now playing in select theaters.