‘The Sentinels’ Director Thierry Poiraud: ‘We Wanted to Bring to Life a Strange Yet Familiar World’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Creating a convincing fantasy world often means inventing something audiences have never seen before. For Thierry Poiraud, director of Lionsgate Play's new French sci-fi series "The Sentinels," the challenge was almost the opposite. Instead of abandoning history, he embraced it, drawing from Belle Époque Paris, the Second Industrial Revolution, pioneering scientific discoveries and real-world architecture to create an alternate reality that feels both extraordinary and believable.

Starring Louis Peres, Camille Razat, Tchéky Karyo, Clément Manuel, Julien Frison and Natacha Lindinger, "The Sentinels" is adapted from Xavier Dorison and Enrique Breccia's acclaimed graphic novel "Les Sentinelles." Set in an alternate version of Europe during the early twentieth century, the series blends historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy as groundbreaking scientific discoveries give rise to extraordinary heroes and terrifying new threats.

"In creating the extraordinary characters, imaginary Paris, staggeringly vast battlefields, and retro-futuristic costumes and machinery, we have managed to retain a sense of functional naturalism," Poiraud told Variety India. "This is how we brought to life a strange yet familiar world that is immediately recognizable by the audience."

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Rather than presenting a postcard version of Paris, Poiraud wanted the city itself to become an integral part of the storytelling, showcasing its contrasts instead of its landmarks. "Throughout the episodes, we sought to show several faces of Paris, its environs and suburbs, where wooden shacks coexist with industrial hangars," he said. That philosophy extended to the headquarters of the Sentinels, which the creative team deliberately concealed inside an industrial setting rather than a conventional fortress.

"The Sentinels have their headquarters on the Parisian outskirts, far from prying eyes and near the waterways," Poiraud explained. "We imagined this as an active factory serving as a cover, such as a laundry, with access to Paris via the sewers, the Canal de l'Ourcq or the Petite Ceinture railway."

The show's scientific foundations were equally rooted in history. While "The Sentinels" ventures into speculative fiction, its laboratories and machinery draw inspiration from genuine breakthroughs that transformed the modern world.

"The laboratory and machinery are inspired by cutting-edge research of the era, Pierre and Marie Curie's work on radioactivity, set in a realistically scientific environment that nonetheless flirts with sci-fi in certain aspects," Poiraud said. The darker side of this alternate world unfolds in Montmartre, where the Damned establish their headquarters inside a weathered cabaret far removed from the glamour typically associated with the district.

"The Damned have their club in Montmartre, which would have been a much-maligned district at the time," he said. "In this domain of debauchery, crooks rub shoulders with decadent bourgeois types and social pariahs. A far cry from the bright lights of the Moulin Rouge, our cabaret is a sort of wooden affair with exposed beams and a rustic, weathered appearance."

The war sequences, meanwhile, were filmed entirely around the Paris region but were designed to evoke something far more mythical. Poiraud cites nineteenth-century illustrator Gustave Doré as a major influence, while the mysterious fortress hidden within the forest pays homage to Akira Kurosawa's classic film "The Hidden Fortress."

"The giant, sprawling, vivid engravings of Gustave Doré inspired us when creating a site of the fantastic—an enigmatic, terrifying, dangerous labyrinth at the centre of which looms a hidden fortress, inspired by the Kurosawa film of the same name," he said.