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Scott Kelly, the astronaut who until very recently held the American record for longest spaceflight, spent at least some of his time aboard the ISS thinking about “Breaking Bad.” NASA will set up calls for the astronauts in orbit with interesting people they want to talk to; so, unlike all “Breaking Bad” fans stuck on Earth, Kelly was able to talk with Vince Gilligan and Brian Cranston — and, as it turns out, director/producer Michelle MacLaren, who was in the room and would remember Kelly when she set out to direct the first two episodes of Apple TV+’s “Constellation.”
Brought on as an advisor to the Noomi Rapace thriller, Kelly sat in Zoom meetings with the “Constellation” production team and also traveled to set to help keep even the zero-gravity scenes grounded in reality. He still has his Soyuz re-entry manual, from which he gave input to the crew “so when Jo [Rapace] is putting stuff in the computer there, when she’s hitting all those inputs, that’s the real stuff. That’s not made up. That’s right from the checklist,” Kelly told IndieWire.
Netflix’s “Spaceman,” without spoiling the Johan Renck film, has a lot of components that aren’t on a checklist. Even the premise — a lone Czech astronaut, Jakub (Adam Sandler), travels to Jupiter to uncover a strange phenomenon while ruminating on his marriage to Lenka (Carey Mulligan) — has a more poetic lilt to it. But there’s a similar interest in the outer space design and the look of Jakub’s ship to be something with futuristic sci-fi polish that feels lived-in.
So IndieWire asked both Kelly and “Spaceman” production designer Jan Houllevigue about what makes the outer space design of a film or a TV series feel like an exploration of the final frontier.
Making Modules Modular
In outer space and on a film set, simplicity and utility are key. “Spaceman” jumps between a number of places, but astronaut Jakob’s fight through his despair is very much externalized by the design of his ship, the Jan Hus. That is at odds with the needs of camera and stunt departments that require space to maneuver. So production designer Jan Houllevigue opted for a modular design. “All the panels were wild, so we could accommodate all camera and stunt requirements. What was complicated was to be able to fit a camera crew or a camera crane with the desired movements plus the different rigs the stunt department had to use.”
To do that, most of the ship panels allowed a rig to travel perpendicular to the walls while a camera crane could move inside the ship itself. “We also put rails in the body’s ceiling and floor for stunts so Adam could move inside on a smaller rig. All of the set dressing came on top of all this and the technical needs stayed in and added to the claustrophobic feeling making the interior much tighter. It was like an origami of layers, shapes, and necessities that formed into a spaceship,” Houllevigue said.
Communication Is Key
However one of the most important textural details of life out in space, according to Kelly, isn’t something we see but something we hear. Crew members are “pretty informal” with each other — they are friends and colleagues, not to mention roommates — “until there’s a very rare occasion where somebody’s got to be absolutely the dictator and decide what to do,” Kelly said. “But it’s all on a first name basis and you’re very casual.” This flies in the face of a lot of writers’ love of invoking ranks or command structures to build tension amongst the crew.
But a space show that’s striving for naturalism has plenty of other places to find it. It is an external crisis, after all, that sets all of Jo’s troubles in motion in “Constellation,” and even in crisis, the way that the astronauts communicate with each other is focused but human.
The Weight of Weightlessness
No show or film will ever achieve the same level of verisimilitude as “Apollo 13” until it repeats Ron Howard’s choice of shooting in microgravity. But Kelly was impressed with the strategies that “Constellation” employed to approximate both life in space and re-entry to Earth.
“I’m an operator, right? I was operating spacecraft and systems in the space shuttle, but it was kind of cool to see this operation that was a production of a show where everyone knows their job. They’re accountable. They know where they are and when they need to do [their job], and to just see this whole thing moving as a whole entity was pretty interesting,” Kelly said.
The collaboration of a whole entity is what made it possible for “Spaceman” to simulate its zero gravity, too. “It was a well-organized choreography by the directing department,” Houllevigue said. “We had a model of the ship and meetings between camera, stunts, VFX, and the art department to meet what Johan wanted to achieve, but with all departments being able to do what they desired.”
Embrace the Mess
When Kelly got to the stage in Berlin where “Constellation” was filmed, he thought the recreation of all the hardware aboard the ISS was top-notch. “But it didn’t look used. And so I was like, ‘Hey, you’ve got to put food stains on this. You’ve got to put coffee stains. This stuff has got to be taped up all over the place, and the cables and the wires have got to look messy,’” Kelly said. “It’s kind of hard to believe how much stuff is on the space station.”
There’s only so much mess that can be added to a set before the aesthetic starts to shift, though. And Houllevigue’s focus with the Jan Hus was ultimately to support a sense of claustrophobia that helps connect the viewer to Jakob — with an Eastern Bloc touch. “We stayed away from the sleek or mostly white futuristic look of some of the other spaceships,” Houllevigue said. “When you look at ISS images you realize how cluttered it really is and we fitted all this into an industrial brutalist claustrophobic submarine-like interior… We wanted the ship to have a certain form and functional spirit with an incredible ISS-like organized mess in it.”
The Gravity of the Situation
Being in space, as opposed to aboard a station or vessel, is another important context shift where Kelly can tell the difference between realistic and extremely squishy sci-fi. “In space, the longer you’re there, the more experienced, the slower you move,” Kelly said. “You move very slowly and deliberately because [if] we get going too fast, we’ll knock sh*t off the walls and that gets dangerous. So it’s a very, almost like more of a ballet than I think in some cases [in fiction.]”
Both Kelly and fellow astronaut Chris Hadfield singled out George Clooney in “Gravity” as exactly how an experienced astronaut wouldn’t move or act while outside the station. “He’s flying around the Hubble, just kind of goofing off there. And the way he spoke to the ground [on the radio], it didn’t ring true to me,” Kelly said.
The Hard Work of Floating
It’s ultimately that professional ethos — casual but not scripted, focused but not melodramatic — that Kelly hoped to bring to the “Constellation” team. And he has admiration for the actors who attempt to get as visually close as possible to moving in zero gravity.
“You’ve got to feel for some of these actors. My brother and I did an Amazon Super Bowl commercial a number of years ago, and I was in the harness with the wires. That is a real physically tough and challenging thing. And to see how long they had to do it [on ‘Constellation’], it was a lot longer than I had to do it. It’s no joke,” Kelly said.
The “Spaceman” team, although working towards a more poetic end for their story, had to figure out similar challenges. “I have been very lucky with the patience of my art directors and our construction companies. Chris Shriver and Josef Alfieri brought a lot of artistic and technical solutions because it was a very complex object,” Houllevigue said. “The human factor is key.”
