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What interested you in telling a story about a man who wants to go into space?
Michael Polish: “It interested me in the way that how would I do this? How could I do this? I know that I can’t go in the space shuttle. I’m not an astronaut but if I had an interest, how would I go about it? So it was basically going back to school and learning about rocket science and rockets. Mark found a great parallel between this and making movies. You need the exact same everything. Family, money, you’re going to put yourself through a lot of financial hard times, getting yourself out there. It was original, still, to us. It was still an original idea.”
And that idea of just following your dreams relates to all aspects of life.
Michael Polish: “It just wasn’t gonna be about space. It’s going to be a metaphor for the stars, and everybody reaching for the stars.”
How did you find the perfect ranch to use as the family’s home?
Mark Polish: “Originally we were going to do South Texas, by Austin. There were so many productions in there we couldn’t squeeze in there and use the facilities so we looked into New Mexico. We thought that’s a good replica of Texas, some of the similar landscapes. We went and saw the house and we were like, ‘Okay, if we could build a barn… If the owner of this house, this set, would allow us to build a barn this would be perfect.’ She was really receptive to allowing us to really build this huge barn. It’s a barn that houses a rocket, it’s not one of your typical feeding barns, a tractor barn. That thing is massive.”
The effects and the rocket ship must have been something new for you to work with.
Mark Polish: “Yeah, it was. It was new but we’d been such fans of work of that type of CGI that we study them. Mike had did some similar stuff in college. He’d worked with some computer graphics, so it wasn’t so new to us that it was threatening. We weren’t intimidated.”
Michael Polish: “You applied everything you wanted to apply. Just like the rocket, you went out and got everything you needed to know about it, about what you were going to do and how to do it. You just applied it."
Mark Polish: “Also we took the approach that we did everything we could practical. Whatever didn’t need computer graphics. Explosions…we filmed all the explosions. And then any kind of dirt that came up, any kind of flames, we just shot that. We though, ‘Let’s mix this and integrate the reality, the real wood blowing, up with the CGI. I think it will be more believable.’ So we took it from that approach also. I just thought, ‘Why would you have to do a fake explosion? We could really blow something up.’ The things that you could really do, why would you lend that to a computer? I never want it to be where you’re dependent on technology to do things you could still do with your hands.”
You also cast your own kids in the film. What it was like directing them?
Mark Polish: “Nerve-wracking at some point. I mean, you’re a parent and that always comes first, filmmaker comes second. But you needed the resourcefulness of your own kids. You needed to be able to have kids that were fixtures in the family. Because we started out as an independent before it was picked up, we were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to make this movie for 5 million? Do you think Logan and Jasper will do this?’ The time and the money and the teachers and social workers that you would use would blow our budget. It was astronomical and we couldn’t afford that so we kind of just wrote the roles where we felt we’d put them in every position that they will succeed in. We won’t put them in a role that’s going really expose that they’re not actresses. We’ll put them in family things. We’ll put them at dinner tables. We won’t isolate them throughout the movie to intimidate them of a movie set. Everything was really conscious of protecting that.”
Did casting your own kids help you keep it more real?
Mark Polish: “There’s a lot of people that responded to how real the family is. And that’s just one of those things you just don’t count on. You just go, ‘Okay, we hope it works. We know what they can do.’”
Michael Polish: “And also you’re checking their performances against what peoples’ perceptions of what kids performances are like. You’ve had great performances out of kids that have said monologues. You go, ‘That’s the way the kids should act in movie times,’ and they weren’t doing that. So you’re always going, ‘Is that going to be right? Is that going to be good?’ Less was more for them. Having giggle fits is real, and talking about weird stuff to their dad is real. So it was difficult to gauge while you were doing it.”
Was it always in the script that the kids, in particular the teenage boy, would be so supportive of their dad?
Mark Polish: “Yeah, because that was us. Our dad was cool. Our dad was a cool dad. He did so much with his hands, he built so much, you admired him.”
Michael Polish: “You got annoyed because you always had to hold stuff. ‘Hold this piece of wood; hold this wrench. Hold this piece of drywall,’ and you’re like [growing impatient]. But you didn’t hate him. He just always stressed the importance of working together.”
Have you both always wanted to tell a family tale?
Mark Polish: “This was just one of those scripts. We have probably ten scripts written. This was one that we could get out. I think this type of movie really inspired us as kids. ET, Close Encounters, those type of movies were really big on us when we were little - 11 years old, 8 years old. So that becomes integrated in your DNA that, ‘Hey, these movies inspired me. It would be great to make one of these movies.’”
Michael Polish: “And there’s an art to them just as much as there’s an art to any film.”
Mark Polish: “It’s a different mindset to go on camera and make a movie like this. But I still want the stuff that I always like to have – the subtext, some people call it quirkiness or whacky characters. But those to me are more truthful to what we see in that sense.”
