As UTF-8 contains lots and lots of characters, and Latin-1 only contains 256 different characters, some of which aren't considered "printable", you cannot do a lossless conversion from UTF-8 down to Latin-1. Using Encode::encode should Just Work still, and either die or replace the unmappable characters to "?". But without any code, it's hard to tell where your attempt goes wrong.

If you want to map arbitrary Unicode to ASCII, there also is Text::Unidecode. But it will map for example \N{SMALL LETTER A WITH DIERESIS} ("ä") to "a", even though "ä" also exists in Latin-1.