Currently in cinemas, The Visitor from the Future is revealed through a star-studded feature film by François Descraques, creator of the cult eponymous web-series released in 2009. But can we go see the film without having seen the latter?
This is undoubtedly one of the events of this new cinema season. Since September 7, you are invited to discover The Visitor from the Future on the big screen: a science fiction comedy that could not be more successful and directed by François Descraques. If this title and this name mean nothing to you, it means that you missed out on the eponymous web-series released in 2009 and which left its mark on a large generation of geeks (and not only).
THE VISITOR OF THE FUTURE: FROM SMALL TO BIG SCREEN
Until 2014, and through 4 seasons and 57 episodes, fans followed the adventures of Raph (Raphaël Descraques, brother of the series creator), an ordinary young man suddenly chased by a man claiming to come from the future and ready to everything to prevent the end of the world (Florent Dorin). 8 years later, this nugget, filmed at the beginning on the telephone and which today totals nearly 50 million views, offers a new skin and invests the cinemas. But then, do you absolutely have to know the web-series to understand the film?
Well the answer is no! Tailor-made for the many fans of the first hour, The Visitor from the Future is just as much for neophytes who have never heard of Raph, the Fox, Matteo or even the temporal brigade. “From 2014, we started working on the screenplayconfided to us François Descraques. At the beginning, what was difficult for me was that I was too attached to the series, so the versions I wrote were too much in its continuity, as if I was doing a season 5.”
“I had to detach myself from it and had the idea of not putting Raph at the center of the story. That’s what freed me and allowed me to find the desired gateway with new characters: the duo Gilbert and Alice (played by Arnaud Ducret and Enya Baroux, editor’s note).”
The two main actors had never seen the web series before agreeing to shoot in the film. “I read the script, and I loved the story of the film, I thought it was great”, enthused Arnaud Ducret. And to underline with humour: “C’is perhaps not so bad besides that I read the film before watching the first episode of the series! (laughs)”
Bet taken up hands down, therefore, for François Descraques who here covets the codes of the original work, and brilliantly succeeds in proposing an unpublished story, for a unique and already unmissable moment of cinema.
“I am proud to have succeeded in making a film accessible to all. But I find it especially important that we can go to the cinema to see something different: the more this kind of project is supported by the public, the more there will be! We have to show that in France, science fiction can work!”
The Visitor from the Future, currently in theaters.
Interview by Mathilde Fontaine in Paris, August 30, 2022.