Like stepping into a planetarium, Johan Renck’s Spaceman is a somber psychoanalysis into the mysterious depths of the human psyche led by a stunning subdued Adam Sandler. Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to writer, Colby Day, about adapting the book, building the relationship between Jakub and Hanus, and crafting the story around the incredible cast.

Jillian Chilingerian: I am someone who will buy a book that I hear is going to be adapted into something and I read the book, and sometimes it’s bad and sometimes it’s good. I’m always curious, you get the source material that you’re adapting, how do you decide what you want to keep and what themes you want to emphasize?
Colby Day: I mean, adaptation is really fun, interesting, weird art because you are kind of translating one medium to another so I was excited to get the book sent to me and particularly excited because I think it’s just like a beautiful novel. I felt both a lot of pressure to try to achieve an interesting, beautiful movie, but also was buoyed by the idea that if I could just convey the feelings the book gave me that would be a successful movie. I was focused on the emotional journey of the movie, the resonance of what it means to have an internal journey by going through the cosmos. The book has a lot of absurdity to it and the initial conception of the movie was maybe huge, closer to comedy, and matched the book more closely. Once Johan came on and Sandler came on and as we kind of added people and teammates, it sort of became clear that Johan was more interested in focusing exclusively on this relationship story. Whereas the book is more about the Czech Republic what it means to be Czech and what it means to have a father who was a communist collaborator. Part of your homework as someone who’s doing an adaptation is like, what can we even fit within two hours? With this, there is a significant portion of the book that happens after what happens in the movie that I initially included, and then we went back and forth about like, how much of that do you need to kind of get the most satisfying ending?

Jillian Chilingerian: That is always hard to adapt books and how much context should be given to the backstory of a character. In the book there are these memories of the characters and how do you interweave those in there without dipping too much into this intimate sentimentality?
Colby Day: The whole book is kind of a memory play. So there’s also something about it that lends itself to adaptation because you can kind of take any puzzle piece and reconfigure it and decide, oh, maybe this works better here, but the inverse of that is that is extremely challenging because it’s happening in the present and the past. When you’re talking about exploring memory, it comes down to what emotionally needs to happen next so it became a big puzzle and notecards of which memories we need, which things go, and where it that changed throughout the process.

Jillian Chilingerian: We’ve seen a lot of space movies and this is my favorite type of genre, even though the thought of space is so scary and I think that’s why these types of movies work. This lonely man is in space, but there’s this love story between Jakub and Lanka and then on the outskirts, it’s Jakub. So How was it to construct the end moments where they’re so far apart, but now they are connected?
Colby Day: I always wanted the ending of the movie to also feel like a new beginning and the book does that well and just gives you more time to be in the feeling of how you create a new life once you’ve changed but I think we always wanted the ending to have this feeling of like everything is irreparably different, but also, the fact that something ends means that something begins and what’s the best way to convey that visually and on-screen?

Jillian Chilingerian: This cast is a cast that you never would expect for you together and it works so well. I was talking to my friend about it, she said It’s like they pulled names out of a hat.
Colby Day: Every time I got a call that was like, also this person is gonna be like, wait, what?
Jillian Chilingerian: Everyone works so well together. When you’re in that writing process and then you’re hearing Adam Sandler is in it. How does that impact when you know that these are the people going to be delivering the words that you’re writing and if you’re adjusting things for them or like what is that collaboration?
Colby Day: When I first did the draft, we didn’t know who anyone would be or that Johan would direct it. It was just here’s a movie and then let’s puzzle a team together. Once Johan had read it and came on board, he had a lot of guidance as far as what he did and didn’t want to focus on within the script. We should not revise anything until we know who Jakub was. I remember being at Sundance and waiting in line to go see a movie and getting a call from the producer saying, oh, Adam Sandler wants to do it and then I had to sit through this movie thinking about, Wait, so I have no recollection of watching that movie. I have grown up loving Adams’s work and I think is key as a tremendous dramatic actor. Johan identified the thing that makes Sandler such a compelling character on screen is you just immediately from his face are rooting for him and he immediately has like a tremendous amount of pathos. Once we knew it was Adam, I then sat down with Johan for about a week and we talked about how everything in the movie works if it’s Adam, how do we configure all these scenes so that Sandler can do them? You have a tremendous amount of data about what this guy can do so it made it really fun and easy to sort of reconfigure. What would it be most interesting to get to see Adam be doing in space, and he also immediately had a lot of really interesting thoughtful ideas and was doing a ton of homework about what it would mean to be in isolation for a long time and what it would mean to have grown up with this sort of relationship with your father, and I just think was very proactively thinking about how to be this character in a way that sort of immediately made us all feel like oh, he is really, really excited to do this. That’s what you want from your actors.

Jillian Chilingerian: Is it daunting writing a story that’s primarily carried by one person and does it factor into Okay, is the audience going to be able to connect and how much do we need to include of other people documenting this journey?
Colby Day: It was always sort of the central conceit of the movie was that it would be a really small self-contained story, Jakub basically alone on a ship for most of the story, and that you’re being his memories of the preparation for the mission and his memories of childhood and his memories and his relationship? It became a puzzle of how long we live with just Adam and now Hanus and how much we need to see back on Earth to understand what’s going on on the mission. The balance shifted over time and we were very cognizant of wanting Lenka to feel full, real, and, a woman who was not sitting around waiting, or who at least had previously waited that no longer wanted to. So that all kind of factored into, like, how long can you be in each place?

Jillian Chilingerian: This film definitely reminds me a lot of one of my favorites, Solaris. Did you have influences from those types of movies? I took a science fiction course when I was in school, and I learned so much about the ’60s and the ’70s in science fiction.
Colby Day: I really love science fiction, it’s really an interesting way to put people in a situation where then we learn more about what makes us people. I have a really strong love for 2001, Solaris, and any heavy, interesting science fiction. The book really spoke to me because it reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s version of science fiction where it is very out there and strange and manages to be really cerebral, but also really, really heartfelt. That balance to me, was always the most interesting part of getting to do a science fiction story where you can talk about the universe and space and like big ideas. But do that in a way where it really is about what those mean to you as a human being. Who’s just like tiny within the scope of the cosmos?

Jillian Chilingerian: When you watch things with collective pain and individualist pain, where you’re like, how do you really measure those? That’s why I also love how science fiction uses those ideas. The relationship between Jakub and Hanus felt really grounded even though he’s a spider.
Colby Day: When I first pitched this movie, I basically was like, it’s a buddy comedy between a man and the alien who meet each other and have to become friends and it’s weirdly a road movie, but about a man and his alien friend. So I always really wanted Hanus to feel really real and he had a point of view. Getting to hear Paul Dano also talk about how much thought he put into as an actor. What does it mean if I’ve been around since the beginning of time, what is my viewpoint on the world and on myself? We always wanted a journey, where Jakub is learning from Hanus, but Hanus is also learning from Jakub. And I think that that’s the key component to making Hanus feel real. Hanus is also going on a journey and it sort of mirrors but as the opposite, of Jakub. I think he starts thinking he knows everything in the universe is as it should be, and then kind of by interacting with Jakub comes to recognize maybe he doesn’t know everything, and maybe there is more for him to learn and oddly learns the value of fear and hope.

Jillian Chilingerian: I mean, even the moment where Hanus is like, Oh, I’m done with you, my observations are done. Jakub is once again, losing another relationship as he’s building up barricades and isolating people. He is having that realization of how that impacts someone through this relationship with this other worldly creature.
Colby Day: It is so lovable and interesting and you just are oddly rooting for him even though he’s just sort of a weird alien guy who may or may not exist, but to me, the most devastating parts of the movie are Jakub and Hanus failing to connect or hurting one another that feels the most present and now whereas the Lenka story is like being told again through Jakub.

Jillian Chilingerian: When she sees the spider on Earth. I’m also curious because you mentioned when you saw it visually from, your words up on the screen and delivered by Adam and Paul, how was that for you? I felt like I was in a sensory chamber when I was watching it.
Colby Day: It’s interesting. I think writing a movie me only the best descriptor for it is, it’s a little bit like seeing the code for the matrix or something where you’re like, seen through the movie into this other layer, and now that it exists, it’s really hard to like to stop seeing the code. I don’t think I ever could have imagined how Adam would do it in the best way and I don’t think I could have imagined how Paul would do it and I don’t think I could have imagined what Carey would like. Each person brought out something really special and unique about themselves. I had my initial conception of what a movie might be, but then you 300 people build it’s so you end up with something that’s so different in the best way and it’s such a surreal, strange experience to have people saying things that you made up in your living room for years or later

You can read our review of Spaceman here.
The film is currently streaming on Netflix.