Outer Space May Be Infinite — but Sets and Budgets Aren’t
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.
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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.
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