DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Johan Renck talks interstellar spiders and making Sandler a Spaceman
AFTER EVERY MAJOR PROJECT, JOHAN Renck, the director behind some of the best episodes of Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and Vikings, found himself wandering the streets of Brooklyn, telling himself “I’m never going to do this again.” In fact, after helming every episode in the Emmy-winning series Chernobyl, he planned on either opening a restaurant or becoming a gardener. But then he read the script for an adaptation of Spaceman Of Bohemia, a 2017 novel by Czech-born author Jaroslav Kalfař, and decided to park his alternate career plans.
“I read it and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit’, because it was so evident that I had to do this movie, it was very biographical for me,” he tells Red Alert. In the main character Jakub Procházka – an astronaut on a one-man mission to collect samples of dust from a mysterious purple cloud that has appeared near Jupiter – Renck saw a younger version of himself, back when he was willing to do anything to achieve his ambitions, even at the expense of his personal life.
“It felt like atonement to do a film in which I go into some aspects of my undoing,” he says. “A lot of people can relate to that. We’re all thrust into this idea of ambition and reaching the next level of progress. But these are not things that are part of the nature of our universe.”
SPIDERS FROM JUPITER
In the film, retitled Spaceman, Procházka – played by Adam Sandler, in his first non-comedy role since Uncut Gems – struggles with loneliness during his lengthy outer-space flight. His wife (Carey Mulligan) decides to leave him, but Procházka doesn’t know; Ground Control decides against sending her pre-recorded break-up message to him.
As he gets closer to Jupiter, Procházka grows more and more desperate to hear his wife’s voice, but instead, something very strange happens: a gigantic interstellar arachnid named Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano) appears before him. It’s as trippy as it sounds, but as with all good science fiction, the high concept is used to explore very relatable feelings of isolation and regret.
“When it comes to the human experience, how characters manifest, their psychology and behaviour, it has to be tremendously authentic,” Renck says. “At the same time, I’m an escapist, and as a filmmaker, I have a lot of leniency to enhance our world. I love giving a lot of room when it comes to an enhanced reality because I want to be intrigued. I love the aspect of world-building.”
The world-building in Spaceman sets it apart from many other voyages of intergalactic discovery; there are some science fiction gizmos, such as a device that’s capable of making lag-free video calls from Earth
