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SPACE ODDITY
SPACEMAN Adam Sandler is a man on a mission, embarking on a weird and wonderful off-planet odyssey.
Few prospects are as exciting as a new dramatic turn from Adam Sandler, but Spaceman director Johan Renck is even more besotted by the star than most, telling Teasers, ‘I love him as an actor, and I’ve grown to have a very deep, profound love for him as a human being.’
But despite his admiration, his goal was to ‘make a character that is zero Adam Sandler. Even in Punch-Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, there’s always an aspect of Adam, which is great, but I really wanted to diminish that. I told Adam, “I want to turn you into me.”’
Hot off the success of the TV series Chernobyl, Renck ‘received one billion scripts about industrial accidents’, but he explains that ‘whenever I’m done with something, I’ve consumed all my interest in anything that’s even remotely close to it. This was completely different and became tremendously self-biographical.’
Adapted from Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, the film sees Sandler play Jakub, an astronaut who leaves his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) to investigate a mysterious purple cloud by Jupiter, only to encounter an alien spider (voiced by Paul Dano), who Renck describes as ‘frightening, revolting, cute, pathetic and loveable, with luscious lips and weird kid teeth.’ While this encounter might not seem like the most autobiographical tale for the Swedish musician-turned-director, he claims ‘everything is personal, and we are all sort of programmed to have this solipsistic view on getting to our purple clouds.’
The purple ‘Chopra’ cloud is more than a means to get Sandler and a space spider chatting, according to Renck. ‘At the surface level, it represents hard-won goals and the human urge to discover,’ the director says. ‘But then it’s kind of the opposite, and contains every vibration of past, present, future and how you can look for forgiveness but your choices are forever part of the canon of our universe.’
Renck describes the core concept as ‘spiritually very Zen’ but also ‘scientifically based in string theory’, and every aspect of the production design speaks to a ‘parallel time that is not a representation of our past or present, with just a whiff of Soviet form and function’. But ultimately, the director was ‘not interested in making people think stuff. I just want them to feel the same way I feel. We choose this weird job because we feel perpetually misunderstood.’
‘We are all sort of programmed to have this solipsistic view on getting to our purple clouds’
JOHAN RENCK
After it premieres at the Berlin Film Festival later this month, Spaceman will head to Netflix. Renck laughs: ‘I’m sure people are gonna get pissed off if they click on Adam’s face hoping for [a] Happy Madison [-style movie]!’ But just as Jakub finds deep profundity from a humanmouthed extraterrestrial spider, those open to the unexpected will find Sandler giving one of his finest performances in an elegant fable about inner and outer space.
SPACEMAN STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM 1 MARCH.