Animators play god, creating worlds from nothing. As writer and director of 2019's Oscar-nominated I Lost My Body Jérémy Clapin knows that omnipotence. Yet while his follow-up feature, Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur terre) may be live action, playing god is very much at its core.

"This is a film about violence," Clapin said, but not in an overt way. In the sci-fi drama, released this week by Metrograph, geriatric nurse Elsa (Megan Northam) is in mourning. Her astronaut brother, Franck (Sébastien Pouderoux), is seemingly lost to the void after a deep space mission went wrong. However, that's when an alien voice starts speaking to her and offering her a deal: provide them with living human bodies that they can take over, and they'll bring Franck back.

For Clapin, the ethical center of the film is about how we constantly value one human life over another. "Elsa tries to start thinking that maybe some people are already ghosts and can disappear and nobody will notice." These questions were put into sharp and uncomfortable focus during the pandemic, as policies were enacted that prioritized the health and safety of some groups over others. "Society doesn't want to see homeless people, or old people who during the pandemic were not chosen to be saved because they put their energy into younger people."

Austin Chronicle: When you're animating, it's so second by second, frame by frame, that you can go, 'I don't like what I just did' and change it. In live action, the process and the act of discovery is so different.

Jérémy Clapin: It's very different, basically the opposite. In animation, there is no continuity. You build the continuity, adding the next shot to the last one. But in live action you cannot break the continuity because people cannot disappear from the shot. You also need the actor to understand what they understand what they are doing in sequence, so there is this step of explaining to the actor, 'OK, you do this and this.'

In animation, there's always a way to come back, and you have the time because it's a long process. If you're not happy, you can go back and you will have exactly the film you want at the end. It takes time but not a lot of money because you do that during the animated process and there are not a lot of people working - maybe a crew of four people. In live action, you start to eliminate hope. On the first day, you have a lot of possibilities of what is going to be your film, and day after day you reduce this because you have to make choices and find the path of the film. You say, "OK, I go there because yesterday I did that, and I see a bit more where the film is going."

Of course, there is the step of editing at the end where you can change, but there is a film that exists during the shooting. It's very unconscious, and a bit abstract, but you have to trust yourself on your decisions. During editing, I did not need the screenplay any more. I just tried to find the film inside the vision.

AC: in I Lost My Body, the conceit of an independent and conscious severed hand is strange, but it's ultimately a film about the life of one young man. In Meanwhile on Earth, there is science fiction and bloody horror, but you have to keep it all grounded within this grounded reality.

JC: When you do animation, because you are not representing the real world and people are not bringing reality into the film. When you do live action, the film is always bringing reality. So how do you bring in people without bringing in too much of their daily life. This was a challenge for me.

In the beginning the screenplay had more fantastic elements, but it was too loud and would have taken too much space, and I did not want to make this kind of science fiction movie. I just wanted to put a little bit of this fantastic element here and here so you can believe it's real - but I did not want to overshadow the journey of Elsa. It has to be very emotional, very interior.

AC: The film is kind of a two-hander, but it's Elsa in conversation with the alien voice. So you're asking something very specific of your lead actress as she's acting against an absence.

JC: If I want to compare it a little bit to animation, in amination everything has to be built, nothing exists really, and when you start to do live action, it becomes complex - how do you bring this unreal thing to the real set? In animation you just bring things together and I'm used to that. Here we have to see the actress during the shooting, speaking to someone. Sometimes it was a little transistor, some times it was something in her ear, and sometimes it was just someone walking with her just out of frame. I didn't anticipate any difficulty for Megan, and she was really focused and really good at making us believe this voice is talking to her.

And it's very vulnerable for an actor or an actress to just start speaking in front of a crew to someone next to her. It's a leap of faith, and day after day she was a bit more Elsa, because Elsa is supposed to speak alone with something and be isolated, and she was in this situation because there were some actors coming in but there were plenty of moments where she was all alone.

AC: When you were casting the alien voice, what were you searching for?

JC: I wanted something very neutral, but it was too neutral in my mind and it started being robotic - like Hal in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It works very well in that film, but in my film I needed to something more organic. I wanted it to be a little spirit talking to Elsa, seducing her without being romantic. We know it's driving Elsa where it wants her to go, but it's subtle.