Ladies and Gen­tle­men, We Are Float­ing in Space: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Adam San­dler, Paul Dano and Johan Renck

Between them, Adam San­dler and Paul Dano have played water boys, sus­pect­ed kid­nap­pers, Bat­man vil­lains and Count Drac­u­la. Johan Renck, the film­mak­er best known for direct­ing the hit tele­vi­sion series Cher­nobyl, saw some­thing else for them both: a jour­ney through time and space, between a cos­mo­naut strug­gling with the prospect of father­hood and an ancient spi­der try­ing to under­stand human­i­ty. LWLies caught up with San­dler, Dano and Renck to dis­cuss the ambi­tion of adapt­ing Jaroslav Kalfar’s sci-fi nov­el Space­man of Bohemia for the big screen.

LWLies: I have to thank you Paul, because I had a long­stand­ing fear of spi­ders before see­ing this film, and now I feel much bet­ter about them after see­ing Hanuš. He’s just a lit­tle guy.

Paul Dano: He’s good. That’s good. It did that for me too. I used to have a recur­ring dream about spi­ders. I’d wake up, swat­ting at nothing.

Now you’ve gone into the mind of the spi­der. You’ve made friends with it. On a dif­fer­ent note – I would love to hear about the first con­ver­sa­tion you had with Johan about Spaceman.

Adam San­dler: Well, I met Johan at a hotel. He was a cool dude. Walked in with a cane. Looked badass. And then he said, ​“I have a script you might like.” I said, ​“Great man sent it over.” I read it. I thought it was tremen­dous. And I said, ​“You want me for this?” He said, ​“Yeah, we’d have fun.” Some­thing about it was fresh to me and my rela­tion­ship with Hanuš was cool as hell. And so I was in, and then two weeks before the shoot, Johan said, ​“You real­ize it’s zero grav­i­ty, right?” And I said, ​“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” In my head, I was like, do we have a place that we float around and stuff? I didn’t real­ize. And then he said, ​“Well, so you’ll be wired up the whole time.” And I said, ​“Oh, god­damnit. I didn’t know that.” So that changed my whole life. I should have bailed right there.

Paul Dano: It’s fun­ny you men­tioned the cane because my first impres­sion of Johan is this very big jack­et he wore. It might have been a fur jacket.

Adam San­dler: Right, right. Who is this guy rolling in here? He’s cool. And he’s a for­mer pop star or something…He’s car­ry­ing some style.

Paul Dano: Right. I’d seen his work and then the script for Space­man was great and strange, but some­times a log­line is enough to imme­di­ate­ly know you want to take a part. Just the idea of Adam San­dler on a space­ship talk­ing to a giant spider…I was sold right away.

Adam, you were very inte­gral to get­ting the film made because it’s not the kind of film that many stu­dios would take a chance on. 

Adam San­dler: Well, I’ll tell you, I expressed my excite­ment to the Net­flix team and they had the same kind of enthu­si­asm right away. Just the look of it, what it could be, this whole new vibe and they were excit­ed. So they were nice enough to say to jump on and be as enthu­si­as­tic as we were.

Giv­en that one of you is a CGI spi­der in the film, I imag­ine you didn’t spend a lot of time togeth­er on the set. 

Paul Dano: No, but it cre­at­ed a real­ly good mem­o­ry for me, because I was a huge fan of Adam’s, both his act­ing work, but also I remem­ber lis­ten­ing over and over again to his com­e­dy albums back when I was in mid­dle school, ​’96, ​’97. Those were real­ly impor­tant to me. So the first time we met was on Zoom and we just start­ed read­ing through the script to see what the hell is this thing. It was a nice way to break the ice. It was real­ly fun just to hear it out loud.

We did sev­er­al Zoom read-throughs, just kind of chat­ting through it and feel­ing it out. I stopped by the set a few times, but yeah, I didn’t get to be there every day.

Adam San­dler: When you did stop by though, it was like an extra great feel­ing. I remem­ber shoot­ing some of the last moments of the movie Paul was there for. I was float­ing pret­ty far away, but know­ing you were there felt good.

How do you man­age to kind of get into that head­space and cre­ate the kind of chem­istry with­out hav­ing phys­i­cal­ly some­one oppo­site you?

Paul Dano: I got to work to play­back, and some dif­fer­ent things were going on, like I had to record with this kind of mask thing in case they need­ed to use facial expres­sions. But you know, so I was work­ing oppo­site the way, so I felt like I was work­ing with Adam. Strange­ly being in a dark room alone is very free­ing, kind of makes me feel loose. So I actu­al­ly found it to be a lot of fun.

You had your own lit­tle spaceship.

Adam San­dler: We went to inter­est­ing places in our brains.

Paul Dano: But you had peo­ple push­ing you around, that’s a whole dif­fer­ent bag because you’re sort of delud­ing your­self when there’s four oth­er peo­ple mov­ing you around on wires.

Adam San­dler: Yeah feel­ing hands on you…but actu­al­ly, the guys were great, they put on their out­fits, they were hid­den in green. I’d feel their hands on occa­sion mov­ing me around and turn­ing me and stuff like that, but a lot of times I was in wires I did feel like I was float­ing there alone. Johan would kind of set the cam­era up in a way, like a crane. So every­body was maybe a hun­dred feet away from me. I was in my own world, it was free­ing. Talk­ing to Hanuš, because I already knew Paul’s voice. It felt great.

Paul Dano: I guess maybe it helped, being put out there, because so much about lone­li­ness in this movie.

Adam San­dler: Exactly.

More gen­er­al­ly did you feel like there was a con­nec­tion between film­mak­ing itself and Space­man? Because I think it can be a lone­ly kind of life. 

Adam San­dler: It can be, yes. Depend­ing on how long a trip it is, it can break your heart and you’re sit­ting in a trail­er miss­ing your every­day life, but it’s also very exciting.

Paul Dano: I think act­ing can be kind of lone­ly. You’re prep­ping alone in your hotel room or your trail­er or what­ev­er and then you’re always like ​“Who am I?”

Adam San­dler: ​“When is it enough? Am I ever enough? Will my grand­ma love me now?” Yeah, it’s a lot of that.

Paul, I would love for you to record a Hanuš ASMR style audio­book thing because I found your voice in Space­man so soothing. 

Paul Dano: [wig­gles his fin­gers like Mr. Burns from The Simp­sons] New busi­ness plan.

Get Johan to pro­duce it, he’s got a music back­ground. But with Hanuš, when some­one says here’s this ancient, almost God-like spi­der, how do you decide what that would sound like? 

Paul Dano: Hanuš felt a bit like a doula to me. There was a sort of calm, expe­ri­enced wis­dom, gen­tle touch, some kind of spir­i­tu­al guide. In our lit­tle rehearsals, I intu­itive­ly moved in that direc­tion. I remem­ber test­ing with Johan, and think­ing, could it be more? But I think it felt best when it sort of lived in the sim­plest calmest place.

Adam San­dler: Noth­ing threw off Hanuš, noth­ing got him angry. A lit­tle case of dis­ap­point­ment on occasion.

Paul Dano: And I think that Nutel­la got him a lit­tle worked up.

For Jakub, the book is an incred­i­ble resource, but what was your process to find the head­space he’s in and the character? 

Adam San­dler: I lis­tened to Johan a lot, I did call the author of the book, he’s a very nice guy and he told me a lot of thoughts he was hav­ing when he wrote the book. Then Johan told me what he was think­ing when he worked on the screen­play. Even­tu­al­ly, you take pieces from every­body through­out the process, and then you com­mit to your own thoughts and that’s how we do it.

Both of you have done a fair amount of voice work now, and I was curi­ous to know if there are any ways your process dif­fers when you’re doing live-action ver­sus voiceover.

Paul Dano: I sort of want to lie and say that there is, but real­ly, I think it’s just that act­ing in front of peo­ple is scari­er. There’s a lot of free­dom when it’s just you in a booth. I’ve not done a ton of it and I was sur­prised how much I enjoyed that space.

Adam San­dler: You don’t feel like you’re wast­ing anybody’s time if you screw up in the booth. You say ​“Let me go again”. When you screw up with a crew of 200, you’re like [somber­ly] ​“I apol­o­gize everybody.”

A key bond­ing moment in the film is when Jakob intro­duces Hanuš to Nutel­la. If you had to intro­duce a giant benev­o­lent spi­der to any earth­ly prod­uct, what would that be? 

Paul Dano: Nutel­la is up there…the first two things com­ing to mind are just a real­ly fine piece of sushi and then sort of the oppo­site. A sim­ple bowl of cereal.

Adam San­dler: A quar­ter-pounder would be nice. How won­der­ful that would be for this spider.

LWLies: You near­ly didn’t make Space­man. You said, ​“I was going to go and open a restau­rant and get out of the movie business.” 

Johan Renck: I do that after every project. I want to quit because I’m so spent. Because I’m too intense­ly involved in what I do and I’m too ambi­tious and all of that. So I’m always a wreck after I fin­ish, and I decide that I’m going to do some­thing else. I’m going to be an author. I’m going to start paint­ing again. And at that par­tic­u­lar time, I was going to open a restau­rant in Brook­lyn where I live, and the kids are going to come there after school and do their home­work and have some food at the restau­rant. I’m going to cre­ate this great room with great music and amaz­ing food and have all my friends and just live there. Nev­er trav­el again. Nev­er wor­ry about this fuck­ing shit busi­ness that we’re deal­ing with all the time. My wife just rolled her eyes because she knows me. Then I read Space­man of Bohemia. And I thought, ​“Here we go again. I’ve to do this.”

The book [Space­man of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kal­far] is incred­i­ble, but it’s quite dif­fer­ent too. I would love to know about the changes you made, and how those were necessary.

Yeah, but we made a lot of changes over the years from the ear­ly draft of the script to what the film became is also dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent. There’s always a process of trans­lat­ing the book into a film – you have the impres­sion­ist aspect of the book, with Jaroslav Kalfar’s beau­ti­ful, poet­ic, intrigu­ing writ­ing, but to make a film work, you have much more con­gru­ent and prag­mat­ic. Take Hanuš, who’s described as this crea­ture with a hun­dred eyes with my grand­fa­ther and my mother’s eyes. That works so beau­ti­ful­ly in a book. But if you would direct­ly trans­late that into a film, it would be just ter­ri­ble, to be hon­est. But anoth­er aspect of this film is that it’s very self-bio­graph­i­cal for me, to be honest.

As a film­mak­er, at least for me, in every­thing I ever do, there’s always one char­ac­ter who is me in some weird, nar­cis­sis­tic way. Like you’re mak­ing these lit­tle por­traits of your­self. But in this film, it’s all me. It’s very much me. So that is the ety­mol­o­gy of the film, but I also changed some aspects because with­in the book because Jaroslav wrote about him­self. And Jaroslav, who I love and adore and I’m doing oth­er projects with because he’s got such a mag­nif­i­cent mind, he was under­stand­ing about all of it, he loves this film. He knows that his book is very dif­fer­ent, and that’s how this works. I write about me, you do about you, and then what­ev­er hap­pens happens.

I have seen some reviews and com­ments say­ing that this isn’t a film we’d expect Adam San­dler to make, and I qui­et­ly dis­agree with the idea that idea – any­one who is a fan of his knows that he’s been doing incred­i­bly inter­est­ing work for many, many years. I know that you were a huge fan of his before you met him. I’d love to hear about what it was that you saw in him that you con­nect­ed to with this project. 

I’m a mas­sive fan of Adam. I love him as an actor. I love his adven­tur­ous­ness and he can do so much, from Hap­py Gilmore to Punch Drunk Love, and Click, I real­ly love Click. And then came Uncut Gems – you have all of that. He’s so ver­sa­tile and he’s such a tremen­dous, ambi­tious actor and he real­ly gets into it. But I think for me, it comes down to some­thing else. It’s his eyes. I have this thing with his eyes that I want­ed to fill the screen with them. They’re so com­pelling. I want­ed to stick the cam­era right up in his face and see these lit­tle sub­tle things going on in his eyes as he’s pro­cess­ing what’s going on around him. As a film direc­tor, those are the tiny things that make you real­ly obsessed about somebody.

But then also a dif­fer­ent kind of con­cep­tu­al thing, in that I want­ed to make a film with Adam San­dler, in which Adam San­dler is very lit­tle Adam San­dler. Any actor is going to be an exten­sion of them­selves, but I want­ed to try some­thing else. I think in a way, I want­ed him to be me. I want­ed him to be me more than Adam San­dler in this par­tic­u­lar film. I’m baf­fled by how skilled he is and how expe­ri­enced he is.

Speak­ing of not being them­selves, Paul Dano gives an incred­i­ble per­for­mance, which is not easy when you’re play­ing a CGI char­ac­ter and even less so when you’re play­ing a god-like spi­der who is just beatif­ic and very calm. I know that you kind of said you were a fan of his before. How did you approach him with the project? Did you just say, ​“Hey, love your work, do you want to play a Talk­ing Spider?” 

It was exact­ly like that. [laughs] He was first on the list because of his cadence and his pecu­liar­ly soft and mean­der­ing voice, and this kind of slight appre­hen­sion in his act­ing. But also, if you look at his body of work, it’s very dis­parate and he’s very adven­tur­ous and all that. I had no fear in ask­ing him because I felt like he’s inter­est­ed in this sort of film. Of course I knew it was dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent to any­thing he’s ever done. We did motion cap­ture on him and all that, so a lot of his per­for­mances man­i­fest­ed into Hanuš’s animation.

I didn’t realise it had been mo-cap! Hanuš is very expres­sive in his lit­tle face and I won­dered how it was done. That’s incredible.

No, we can’t invent that! You can’t invent act­ing. We’re going to trust the ani­ma­tors to just wing that? No, it’s all mo-cap. And it was a long process for Paul because the beau­ty and the curse of CGI char­ac­ters is that you can rewrite them on a dai­ly basis. So I did a lot of rewrit­ing of his lines and adapt­ing and throw­ing things out, which is an inter­est­ing thing. I’ve nev­er done that before, I’m used to hav­ing a script and you make sure that that script is kind of flaw­less when you shoot. If you get to shoot­ing and it’s not good, you just cut it out. But here you can adapt it and amend it.

Did you find that kind of freeing? 

Free­ing but also, we like bound­aries, you know. To some extent, white papers are a neme­sis of any­thing we do.

Espe­cial­ly when you’re work­ing with a huge com­pa­ny, you don’t want to be seen to be wast­ing their time. 

No, no, no, exact­ly. We’ve been very blessed in terms of the sup­port from Net­flix, who have been tremen­dous­ly great part­ners on all this. But even­tu­al­ly, with any project, you have a very dis­tinct fin­ish line because mon­ey is a thing.

This is your sec­ond fea­ture, but you’ve done music videos and tele­vi­sion for a very long time, and you’ve been quite kind of open about the grind and not want­i­ng to get stuck where you are sac­ri­fic­ing cre­ative con­trol on a project, just to get it out there. When you’re work­ing on tele­vi­sion projects, how does your cre­ative process differ? 

Well, when we say TV, we have to look at two dif­fer­ent aspects of TV, lim­it­ed series and ongoing.

I know you said you’re not real­ly into the ongo­ing series. 

No, I’m not. They are what they are, and I under­stand they have to be made, but it’s much more of a group effort. If you’re mak­ing a pilot for a TV series, you are respon­si­ble for that, you’re prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for part of the cast­ing and all that kind of stuff, but to some extent, the showrun­ners and who­ev­er, it has to work in per­pe­tu­ity. So to some extent, it becomes a lit­tle bit of a weird democ­ra­cy, which I’m not very inter­est­ed in, to be hon­est. The lim­it­ed series, whether it’s Cher­nobyl or The Last Pan­thers or a few oth­er ones I’ve done, they’re much more like a fea­ture film, a very long fea­ture film, cut into episodes, and there you have, you’re respon­si­ble for all of it. I love lim­it­ed series. I might love lim­it­ed series even more than films in some weird way because you have the ben­e­fit of both being char­ac­ter-dri­ven and plot-dri­ven at once.

Yes, you have time as well, you have so much time. 

Which is a bless­ing and a curse! But yeah, to me, I have no inter­est in projects where I can­not be the film­mak­er that I am, which means I wan­na be there from A to Z, and it’s impor­tant for me to do the whole thing, using my lan­guage and my tonal­i­ty and the artis­tic expres­sion of it all. With ongo­ing TV series, it’s much more lim­it­ed, and it becomes a dif­fer­ent kind of con­sor­tium of peo­ple hav­ing to have their say. To be hon­est, I’m not very good at being part of that. I just lose interest.

Speak­ing of cre­ative vision, one of the things I love about Space­man is the very well-worn, shab­bi­ness of the space­ship and Jakub’s cos­tum­ing through­out the film. It feels like there’s so much kind of visu­al sto­ry­telling going on at the same time. What inspired the film’s aesthetics?

I don’t have any obvi­ous inspi­ra­tion for any­thing I do. I always make a mood board in the ear­ly days of putting a film togeth­er that I share with the head of depart­ment, but my rule with mood boards is that they can nev­er include a frame from anoth­er movie. I’m not inter­est­ed in ref­er­enc­ing oth­er films at all.

One of the main rea­sons I even got into film was for the visu­al aspects and the world-build­ing of it, because I’ve always been tremen­dous­ly inter­est­ed in that. I’m a pho­tog­ra­ph­er and a lot of my ear­ly music videos I shot myself and pro­duc­tion designed myself, but even­tu­al­ly I found my pro­duc­tion design­er, Jon Elvig, who I’ve worked with for 20 years. He’s done every­thing I’ve done, apart from Cher­nobyl actu­al­ly, because he didn’t have any TV expe­ri­ence and HBO wouldn’t let him. Jon and I have a short­hand, and with Space­man, I want­ed it to be chaot­ic, I want­ed it to have a cer­tain grain­i­ness to it, I want­ed it to feel real. Authen­tic­i­ty to the expe­ri­ence is tremen­dous­ly impor­tant to me. I want it to be expe­ri­en­tial, I want to vis­cer­al­ly be there, and I have to film it like that, as if you are the eye who’s watch­ing. The biggest chal­lenge with Space­man was that there’s so much neces­si­ty for CGI, both in that we have a crea­ture that is CGI, and we have a lot of exte­ri­or world in space that is CGI. It was tricky to mar­ry that with the grit­ty, raw sort of messy chaos of what you have in the spaceship.

I real­ly want to know what the sto­ry is about Sparks writ­ing the clos­ing cred­its song for Space­man, because they’re one of my favourite bands. 

They were my first idols. From the age of 10 to 14 or some­thing like that, Sparks was my favourite band. Then through var­i­ous machi­na­tions in life, I got to know them. We’ve been entan­gled and we tried to make a musi­cal film some 10 years ago. Then when this came up and Max Richter was scor­ing the film, he said, ​“Should we do a lit­tle song for the end titles?” I said, ​“Fuck yeah, and I know exact­ly who I’m going to call.”