the creative genesis of the film
actually came from what is a story that
can be told that's both interior
mentally but also has a grander scale
essentially one man alone in a room but
trying to make this grander story about
a man on pretty much the greatest
adventure that mankind could have at
this point
approaching the unknown is an
independent sci-fi film about one man on
a one-way mission alone to the planet
Mars I wanted to have a tactile and a
visceral experience of space I didn't
want to use computer graphics because
really it is about the characters
sensory imagination of what's out there
so I wanted to have models and space
itself have texture and weight and depth
that you can't get with CGI not many
people work in practical models anymore
so we were looking for you know who some
of the experts of this in the world are
and obviously finding Doug Trumbull who
is the special effects supervisor on
2001 and closer encounters in the Third
Kind Blade Runner and all the way up to
Terrence Malick's Tree of Life those are
incredibly signature films for a reason
is partially because they were doing
things that like no one else was doing
now that I look back on these movies I
say hey they actually still look pretty
good they've aged gracefully we tracked
him down and you know he was just kind
of amazing because he's you know
somewhat left the Hollywood world to
create his own studio in the berkshires
these young filmmakers came to me with
their vision cold called me because they
wanted to make a low-budget sci-fi movie
I said okay so I find movie that's good
you're young that's good and so I
thought well one of the things about it
that I like is is being able to train
young filmmakers in this art form we
were able to shoot at his studio where
there's model-making shops and a green
screen room and the tanks for the
underwater materials and it was just a
wonderful place to to play and
experiment and figure this stuff out on
our own but with the guidance of pretty
much the godfather of you know special
effects
everything we've been doing out here
we've been taking like the newest of the
new stuff and combining it with some of
the like most classic stuff that's
almost completely abandoned at this
point and and inventing something new
you get something it doesn't look like
anything's ever been made before it's
relatively easy of course to make a
model of a spaceship but to make one
that can work on camera and extreme
close-up and feel realistic is a very
different set of skills all the science
and all the ways things work we tried
hard to research those things and make
sure that they would comport with
scientific scrutiny there are a lot of
people on this thing that are learning
stuff you know myself including it's
like a collective thing it's a bunch of
people figuring this stuff out together
and what it ends up being is kind of
always better than what anybody thought
it would be
for the emptiness of space we created
these giant tanks that we fill with
glycerin and corn syrup and salt water
and then be swirling in inks and dyes
and glitter and dust and all these
things so that space itself was viscous
and present the director wanted the film
to become progressively abstracted and
kind of mysterious and almost as though
the astronaut is going mad and so
they've been using this tank a lot and
using other tanks and sheets of glass
and all kinds of things like a lot of
times like we found really cool effects
while trying to figure out how to
control other effects something weird
happens you'd be like well that's really
cool and then you kind of follow that
and go like okay well what can that be
used for can I be used in a separate
part of the film it's become a staple of
my philosophy about the fact that if you
allow some unexpected phenomena to
happen while the camera is running
you'll get something that no computer
graphics algorithm code writer could
make because the unexpected will happen
and surprisingly enough you get a lot of
really great stuff really fast you know
if you punctuate an independent film
that's very character-based with these
scenes of spectacle it really can
elevate the emotions of the story to
another level and it can open up a bunch
of kinds of stories that you can tell
the character goes from being a
scientist who thinks he knows everything
that's going to happen to being a poet
who realizes that he can only really
learn the value of an experience by
doing it by trying something and just
seeing what happens
the core message is really just to go
out and try to do something beautiful
for yourself
you