Interview with Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Co-Creator of RUNNER.

The world of RUNNER is visually astounding, and the lore of the nations and characters who inhabit it is deep and rich. The person defining its aesthetic, and helping to shape its diverse cultures and unforgettable characters, is director, animator, and visual effects artist, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan. We spoke to him about the vision for RUNNER, and the process of bringing this incredible world and its enchanting inhabitants from idea to fruition.

You've created this incredible, sprawling world with such intense detail and so many incredible locales and characters. How do you figure out a starting point for something so grand, especially when you’re creating it from scratch?

The starting point was racing. Bryan [Unkeless, the founder of Clubhouse Pictures] and myself were talking about doing something about racing. He was talking about more American stuff, but I grew up with the “Paris-Dakar” a relay race across two continents, and it was more interesting to me to do something like that, because it mixes racing and adventure. It’s kinetic and dynamic, but it needs to be exciting, too.

I'm really interested in culture and in the differences between cultures. So Omega was an opportunity to create a new world with new cultures in it, and an opportunity to conceive of ways of living and interacting that are different to how things are here on Earth. I went back to university as an adult to study Native American culture, and that led me to study Norse culture, Japanese culture, and others.

Because of colonialism and now thanks to globalization, much of the world today is defined by European, Christian culture. But when you start to look at other cultures, there are many other peoples and places that are not defined by those values. If I'm going to create a world that isn’t this world, I'm going to use that opportunity to try to see if I can incorporate world views that aren’t from the West, or from Europe, or born from Christianity.

For example, the notion of ownership and property — of owning land, and whatever is in the land, and above the land — that notion does not exist in all cultures. In some cultures, you don't own the land, you just live on it, you steward it, you care for it. I wanted to incorporate that, so you’ll see that Severus Traegen [the ruler of Omega and head of the Avalonian Union] is called the “Protector” of Omega, and sometimes the “Great Steward.”

The idea of ownership is very fluid on Omega, and some nations are nomadic, so there is no sense of ownership to begin with for them. Similarly, “war” doesn’t exist on Omega. On Earth we have a warrior culture of sorts, but culture on Omega isn’t built on that — taking over a neighbor through violence, that’s inconceivable. There are scuffles between nations, and within them, but they’re all settled with racing.

Each nation has such a strong and distinctive visual identity, as does each protagonist or villain. How do you balance the need for diversity with the need to make the project cohesive and to have everything feel like it comes from the same world?

Because of my job, I've lived in many places. The most recent was Thailand, which was very interesting to me because they're a very pious nation, but they're also very open-minded in many ways that more Western cultures aren’t. They’re also very specific in their values, and their religion is Buddhism with Hindu influences.

That mix of influences is fascinating to me, and I wanted to make Omega a world that shines with cultural differences. And even though there’s no war, the world of Omega isn’t perfect. That’s good because a world that is perfect could be a boring world at least for a TV show. If everybody loves everybody else there’s no story, no drama — for a compelling story you have to have tension. Whether that comes from wealth disparity — which sometimes is the real problem behind everything, really — or cultural differences, or the establishment, or whatever.

Let’s talk about something that’s integral to the story, the “Pinches,” which are these wormholes that can transport people from one place to another in an instance, and could be the difference between the Avalonians continuing to rule Omega for another 100 years, or being overthrown.

So the Pinches were very clear to me from the beginning, because just talking about racing, well, that’s going to be boring after a while. Racing is cool, but it’s only a small part of the story, really. I wanted something more overarching, more macro, something that could be world-changing. Not world-saving, because I’m not very interested in that from a narrative perspective, but world-changing. I wanted to throw a curveball into the entire system.

I’m also very interested in physics, and I have a friend working at CERN in Geneva . He fascinates me, once we were talking about  wormholes,Exotic matter and so on. I come at things like a storyteller and I love when he schools me and tells me, “no, that’s not how this works,” or “that should be like this.” It breathes new life in the way I think of the story.

I always thought that there was something tabula rasa-like about this kind of situation. If someone on Omega — just one person — can figure out how these wormholes work, and how to harness them, then it changes the whole world. It would be a world-shattering event.

So I started to think of the world of Omega as, like, a ball of gruyere cheese, full of holes, and they move and change sizes all the time, so they are impossible to map. One day someone finds out these holes are there, and that if you excite them a certain way, then something happens, and you can move through them. Suddenly everyone wants to work out how to use this new knowledge… how to master it.

So, with the Pinches, the establishment is not being challenged just by someone that is stronger or smarter, it’s being challenged by a situation, and a situation is always better. It's the combination of that situation and the right characters that changes everything, and to me — and to Blaise — that’s much more interesting and makes for a much more interesting story.

How did you and Blaise end up working together?

Bryan introduced us. When I started to conceptualize the world and the cultures we realized it was time to bring on someone who can write. Because originally we were writing this as an animated television show. I'm a big fan of anime, I come from the animation world, and this story seemed like a good fit for it. We realized, you know, people are going to have to interact in this world and someone needs to write that story. And look, I’m good, but I’m not good at everything. Blaise brings a different skillset, but he’s also worked in animation, and we’re into a lot of the same things, so we’re very compatible and it’s a very complementary relationship.

We love to riff on things. Like, how does this nation interact with that nation? What’s the backstory? What’s the history between them? Today I called him up to talk about a rite of passage for a character, and to work out how it would work and what it would look like, and how it might affect a character and his brother, who also has to do the same rite of passage but who has a very different personality.

Blaise and I don’t agree on everything — which is good — and I’ve learned that if I can’t convince him about something, if it’s easy to take down or debunk, then maybe it’s not a good idea. And I think the same goes for him.

Is there something in the story that you are particularly excited to see visualized?

I'm always a big fan of worlds that have complexity. It’s not just about the big city shots or whatever, it’s the really small details that I’m excited about. But I’m also excited about the racing, too. When you talk about racing, lots of people think about Formula One, or they think about Indy, or they think about other things on circuits. But this race is an adventure.

We're going to go across these huge, different landscapes, and all kinds of wild and crazy and dangerous things are going to happen. So it's like a road trip, and it has some of the same features as a road trip… but it’s a very high-stakes road trip.

What are you really excited for newcomers to see, or to take away from the story, in this world?

Well, that’s a big part of why I wanted to do this project, and why we went with Metaversal, actually. It’s the open nature of the world. I love fan art, and I love fanfiction, but Hollywood is a very protective environment. Even though I’m a Hollywood director, I find myself drawn to huge, open-world games. And I'm a big fan of people being able to come up with their own stuff.

A big aspect of this project for me is being able to say, “Listen, this is the world that we created. We tell the story of a dozen people in it. But there are millions of people in this world. If you want to play in it and tell other stories, please do.” We’re opening a few of the doors, and telling people to come in and play, and to find new doors to open and paths to take themselves.

Often, in Hollywood, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen and a lot of money on the line and — while I don't think anyone is ill-intentioned — that often means the creative system gets clogged. You get told what you can’t do or what’s not going to happen.

But with web3 you don’t have to wait to have $100 million to make the project you want to make. You can make what you want and reach fans directly, without all that red tape. And you can involve fans right from the beginning, which isn’t normally possible. In that sense, it’s even better than the usual ways stories like this get told. And I think that’s very, very exciting. Not just for us, but for fans, who are going to get to play in this world we’re creating.

CEDRIC NICOLAS-TROYAN is an award winning Hollywood film director born and raised is the southwest of France where dreaming of Japanese animation, super heroes, and making movies was not the obvious choice. Now, he has the opportunity to marry his love for Anime and comics with decades of storytelling experience. Cedric is known for KATE, THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER’S WAR, and SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN.