Mark Johnson
The Dude Abides
By the way, Michael's comments about the dynamics between the crew got me thinking that some of you may find interesting the fact that the original story involved a joint Russian-American mission. We cast Tim Abell (Sam) as the all-american astronaut type and had cast a Russian actor to play opposite of Ana as her husband. Thus, the original script played off of some political tension and had a number of lines spoken in Russian (some with subtitles and some without).
We even had gone so far as to have "seething" Mike Hechanova shoot footage in Times Square and at NBC where he was working so that we could cut to a crowd scene with the story breaking on the big SONY monitor in Times Square. We also had developed a rather cool technique to recreate NASA Mission Control that I hated to lose.
However, two things occurred: 1) we lost our Russian male actor; and, 2) we started looking closely at our set and realized that the ship wouldn't really work as a contemporary NASA-style space station. As we worked on casting a replacement for our Russian actor JDS remembered that he had gone to school with Todd Lowe and knew that he was no longer doing Gilmore Girls and was yet to begin shooting his HBO series. Jack called Todd and he agreed to jump on board. With the whole Russian/American conflict discarded we realized that a whole new interesting dynamic would arise by casting Tim Abell as Ana's husband.
Frankly, this is the kind of stuff that is worth spun gold to me. As film makers we are really god-like in our ability to create these worlds from nothing. By going through the process of developing the original script into what you see on the screen now, we really learned an amazing amount. I give a whole bunch of credit to Tim, who always seems able to see the bigger picture and is more than willing to "kill off our babies" if it will serve the story or allow us to move the ball towards finishing a production in time.
We even had gone so far as to have "seething" Mike Hechanova shoot footage in Times Square and at NBC where he was working so that we could cut to a crowd scene with the story breaking on the big SONY monitor in Times Square. We also had developed a rather cool technique to recreate NASA Mission Control that I hated to lose.
However, two things occurred: 1) we lost our Russian male actor; and, 2) we started looking closely at our set and realized that the ship wouldn't really work as a contemporary NASA-style space station. As we worked on casting a replacement for our Russian actor JDS remembered that he had gone to school with Todd Lowe and knew that he was no longer doing Gilmore Girls and was yet to begin shooting his HBO series. Jack called Todd and he agreed to jump on board. With the whole Russian/American conflict discarded we realized that a whole new interesting dynamic would arise by casting Tim Abell as Ana's husband.
Frankly, this is the kind of stuff that is worth spun gold to me. As film makers we are really god-like in our ability to create these worlds from nothing. By going through the process of developing the original script into what you see on the screen now, we really learned an amazing amount. I give a whole bunch of credit to Tim, who always seems able to see the bigger picture and is more than willing to "kill off our babies" if it will serve the story or allow us to move the ball towards finishing a production in time.
