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

In Johan Renck's cosmic epic, Adam Sandler and Paul Dano are a lonely astronaut and an ancient spider who form an unlikely friendship. That's the tip of the iceberg.

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.

Adam Sandler and Paul Dano

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.

Jonah Renck

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.”

Published 29 Feb 2024

Tags: Adam Sandler Johan Renck Paul Dano