Outer Space May Be Infinite — but Sets and Budgets Aren’t (original) (raw)

Scott Kelly, the astronaut who until 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, which he gave 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.

There’s a thrill sometimes in seeing space-set adventures that at least acknowledge the checklist, taking even psychologically fantastical stories like “Constellation” or survival yarns like “The Martian” and grounding them in a hard sci-fi setting. Those shows look that much more possible, more real.

But even the more unreal sci-fi stories out there, your “Star Wars” and your “Alien” and your “Star Trek” franchises, need to gesture at the reality that’s both so visceral and matter-of-fact to Kelly. Production design teams can take wildly different premises and setting and approaches to get to the same goal: making spaceships and space stations feel real, lived-in and well-used or maybe a little too corporate, too clean.

So IndieWire has reached out not just to Kelly but to production designers of some of the most transporting space-set TV shows and films this year: “Spaceman” production designer Jan Houllevigue, “Slingshot” production designer Barry Chusid, and “Alien: Romulus” production designer Naaman Marshall. We asked them about what makes a film or a TV show set in outer space actually feel like an exploration of the final frontier.

• No Space to Hear You Scream

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Neither Jeff Bezos nor Elon Musk has yet solved a fundamental reality of space travel: it is cramped and uncomfortable. But that claustrophobia is something that production designers can take advantage of. On “Alien: Romulus,” Naaman Marshall worked with director Fede Alvarez to play with and vary a mix of tight, oppressive spaces, which then opened up into larger, more vast environments. “I definitely was not shy in creating spaces that were old, tarnished, and abused. I wanted it to feel like every space had been touched by the crew with a history being told through the layers of patina,” Marshall told IndieWire. “The shapes of corridors and use of the antiquated technology were influenced heavily by the original. I especially liked the use of the geometric padded walls that were so iconic in the early films.”

• Making Modules Modular

Image Credit: Jon Pack/Netflix
It’s no wonder that kind of geometry keeps showing up in films and TV since “Alien” production designers Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger popularized their hexagonal nightmare. 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.
Unlike origami paper, the “Alien: Romulus” design needed to be recycled again and again. “It makes the builds much more complicated when you are trying to get two or three looks out of one set. Sometimes sets would be recycled overnight. These are very gratifying moments for me when the crew walks into a set they have just filmed on days earlier and they see it completely transformed,” Marshall said.

• Design Can Be Deceptive

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Where there isn’t necessity, there can be suspicion. For “Slingshot,” production designer Barry Chusid leaned not on the realities of space travel but of air travel to create a design language that is trying really hard to seem calming and inoffensive — and is protesting perhaps too much. And he shows that there are myriad ways to use production to create an unsettling mood that a film can ramp up over the course of its run.
“I played it as if you’re on Delta Airlines — or maybe not Delta, maybe Emirates or something where it’s a little fancier, just that idea that you had that kind of familiarization with [the spaceship] so you’re kind of comfortable in that way,” Chusid told IndieWire. “We didn’t go for a deep, dark green so that basically you’d have that mysterious kind of quality.”
Even without a truly atmospheric sense of mystery, “Slingshot” uses a slightly heightened realism to get to a similar place.

• The Weight of Weightlessness

Image Credit: Jon Pack/Netflix
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.”

• Communication Is Key

Image Credit: Apple TV+
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.

• Embrace the Mess

Image Credit: Jon Pack/Netflix
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.”

• Nothing Beats Preparation

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Even knowing that minimalism makes spaceships look more fantastical than they are in real life, there’s a hoard of things that the production team needs to work out about and around them. Marshall said that the prep process turned the Rennaissance upside out and inside out in order to get the VFX, special effects, camera, art, costume, makeup, and all other teams pulling in the same direction.
“The DP and I worked closely on incorporating practical lights into the sets where we knew we needed them. He was able to sit with my set designers and art directors and really figure out a tight lighting plan before the sets were built. The collaboration between costume designer Carlos Rosario and myself is something that can’t be overlooked. Sharing inspirations and color palettes ensures a cohesive esthetic on all levels,” Marshall said.
The VFX team on “Alien: Romulus” needed to know early on what the overall look would be so they could begin building digital environments during the shoot, which helped inform the mood, lighting, and camera movement choices on set. Special effects needed to know where and how to operate doors, control smoke, and build pools and water systems for key moments. “The cockpit, for instance, was built on a gimbal 5 meters off the ground. Structure, weight, and idea of how much movement was needed were all parts of that conversation,” Marshall said. “Proper prep allows for these decisions to be made.”

• The Gravity of the Situation

Image Credit: Apple TV+
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 shit 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.