This has been a hot year for Jon Spaihts, mpandeha finally got made and has arrived just in time to close out 2016. Jon also co-wrote the very popular Dokotera Mahagaga with Director Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jon during the recent mpandeha “junket” and speak to him about the film along with his upcoming projects for 2017. Below, you can read our interview with Jon Spaihts.

 

iHoror: Hi Jon. Wow, this is truly a treat. I recently discovered that you are working on Van Helsing & Ny maman.

Jon Spaihts: Yeah, it is a fun season. Eric Heisserer who is a good friend of mine wrote Arrival, and he and I co-wrote Van Helsing, which I am very happy with, it is a great script.

iH: So, is that Universal that is going to be doing it? [Van Helsing]

JS: Yes, they were interested in building a cinematic universe around their classic monster properties with interconnected films, the Marvel model and it is not a bad idea. Yeah, so with both The Neny a ary Van Helsing we are launching that universe.

iH: That is just awesome. The Mummy, is that already completed?

JS: Right now it is in post, I think it might be a summer movie.

iH: I am looking forward to it. Yesterday evening a group of us watched mpandeha, and we were asked to send in our reactions to the film. My first reaction and thought were “Storytelling At Its Finest.” That script was perfect; everything moved along with it. The cinematography, the sets, the acting, everything just flowed seamlessly throughout the entire film.

JS: Yeah, the department heads on this movie are just as good as they come. It was such a pleasure to watch everyone do what they do. Rodrigo Prieto our DP and his gaffer they just did fashionable things with light. Just the photography is relentlessly stunning. I am a stills photography shooter, so I pay attention to the technicalities, and my goodness, the quality of the photography was almost distracting on the set. You’re watching a scene, and you almost get pulled out of it, from just this Vermeer painting that was on the screen.

iH: It is very mesmerizing, and I just found out that the film is actually going to be shown in 3D when it is released. I am definitely going to go back and check it out. When you wrote the script was the Avalon [The Ship] your vision? Or were there a bunch of changes to the physique?

JS: The design of the ship was the one really big change from my scripted vision to the film Guy Dyas, the production designer invented the rotating helical ship, which is just a treat to watch fly by, visually it is a striking ship. I was imagining a much more conventional space bearing cruise ship. My inspiration was a very futuristic cruise liner that was prototyped by the architect  Norman Bel Geddes who did a lot of fantastical futuristic cars things back in the day, in the 60s’. He designed a cruise ship and in my head that Norman Bel Geddes cruise ship was the Excelsior at that time, and we had to change it to the Avalon because it turns out there is a starship Excelsior in the Star Trek izao rehetra izao.

iH: One part about the Avalon really intrigued me was the force-shield around it, I had never seen anything like that before.

JS: Well it is nice to account for it, especially when you’re really talking about relativistic flight through space. Speeds approaching the speed of light, contact with individual molecules of space gas transfer dangerous amounts of energy to a ship. So if we are ever going to fly at those speeds, we will need to account for space dust. Space rocks are vanishingly rare, very low odds of hitting something big and clunky in space, but particles and gas are everywhere. Yeah, so the ship would need a countermeasure.

iH: It never really dawned on me until I watched the film and that is when I realized, “Yeah, that is pretty accurate.” [Both Laugh]

JS: Yeah, pretty important. Especially for a long haul.

iH: Yeah especially for over a hundred years.

JS: Yup, one hundred and twenty years.

 

iH: How involved were scientists or anyone in that field when you were writing your screenplay?

JS: When I was writing the script; I do a lot of work with an outfit called The Scientific Exchange which does matchmaking of scientists of the national science foundation and entertainers. It is designed both to give entertainers better story ideas and help them realize their visions but also to improve the quality of science in films and the standing of scientists. As a consequence of that work, I have a lot of friends who are at JPL or serious space scientists or physicists. So there were a couple of consultations. There was a guy named Kevin Peter Hand who designs unmanned space missions and distributes packages for space probes and is very interested in finding life under the ice in Europa. He weighed in on some of the physics and concerns of relativistic flight.

iH: Wow, there are a lot of moving parts to this.

JS: Yeah and there is a very interesting research group inside of NASA that does edgy forward-looking blue sky research, and they are looking among other things at the earliest stages of space hibernation because space is bigger than everyone thinks, it is counterintuitively big and even short hops, like flights to Mars and the planets of our system, are like months and years long and we are going to need to figure out how to live through that.

iH: When you really start thinking about space itself, it is really mind-blowing. I cannot even process the endless

JS: The vastness.

iH: Yeah exactly, and the fact that now our movies are having some scientific input is just amazing. Years ago many creators would just think of an idea for a sci-fi film and create it. Now there is a foundation of research behind it.

JS: Yeah, you see a chasm opening in science fiction filmmaking. In the last Star Wars movie, we saw ships, very little ships hopping from planet to planet, really from star to star like you were taking a cab across town. With implied elapsed times of no more than an hour and that is a very fantastic universe, a very magical universe. But then there is this other crop of movies that are planting their feet in reality and telling space stories, this lovely escalation where we had Gravity in orbit, and then the Marshan on Mars, and then Interstellar in the outer planets and now mpandeha doing the first interstellar flights and all of that very much in the vein of 2001. Very grounded cinematic science fiction.

iH: I think that is good because over the years it seems that space exploration amongst the younger generation has died out. When I was a kid everyone wanted to be an astronaut and go to the moon. You know I don’t hear about that too much anymore. I am hoping that these types of films and this groundbreaking technology will influence our younger generation.

JS: I think so too. The feedback cycle between fact and fiction where if you go to JPL and talk to people about why they became a scientist, a lot of them will start talking to you about Captain Kirk and Mr.Spock. Even though there was a lot of good science on that show [Star Trek] the spirit of science infused into the spirit of exploration and that changed many, many young people and helped shaped their life goals. You know the space program began in the 60s’ by leaping to the moon at a competitive race that was linked to the threat of nuclear war and the development in turn of continental ballistic missile technology. But since then we have sort of fell back into lower earth orbit where virtually everything has happened since that is where the economic gains are because that is where communications satellites and Earth facing telescopes and other cameras and things. That is where there are real economic benefits, communications relay in Earth watching, but we are beginning to expand with unmanned missions. The planetary missions have been done robotically for the last couple of decades are increasingly extraordinary. The robots are getting cheaper, smaller, are doing more, and they are lasting longer, and now there is real talk again about sending people to another planet, and that dream is going to electrify the minds of a new generation.

iH: Yeah, I mean to think that my daughter may possibly have the opportunity to travel to Mars is so crazy to think about.

JS: Having people stationed on the Moon and we have had people stationed in Earth’s orbit, to have people visiting Mars and to have people living there for a while; that is extraordinary stuff.

iH: This is just a stepping stone to go beyond Mars; that is incredible. Did you start working on this [Passengers] in 2014?

JS: Much before.

iH: Much before, but was it slated for a 14 release? It seemed as though there were others attached to it.

JS: There were a few versions of the movie that nearly got made. There was a version that almost got put together in 2014, that fell apart and led to this new carnation of the film.

iH: Well, I am glad that it did because it is a wonderful film.

JS: Yeah, it was an extraordinary blessing to see it made in such high style. We had two of the biggest stars in the world and beautifully suited for the roles. We had an amazing team of artists, sufficient budget to visualize this journey.

iH: Their chemistry together [Pratt & Lawrence] is just going to be that love story of the new generation.

JS: I hope so. It is funny because while the whole story is set on a starship, there is a lot of science fiction in the frame. The movie will sink or swim. Fall or fly, based on how that love story lands for people and when I see it the love story just sort of lands so beautifully, I think they bull’s-eye it. The pivotal scenes of their relationship are by far the most powerful in the film. In the scene where their relationship turns unexpectantly, I think is the masterpiece of the film.

iH: I definitely agree. For me love stories are on the bottom of my list, this for me changed my perspective. There was comedy, love, grief, everything you could ask for in a film just wrapped up into their relationship. Did you write it that way originally?

JS: Absolutely, it was always that. The premise, you know people wake before their time, a guy that wakes up ninety years too soon seem to lead inevitably to the events of the movie, and in my mind, there was only one way this could unfold and the one thing that would become the inevitable crucks of the drama. So the story was born almost ten years ago in a ripping conversation on the phone and the spine of it has not changed since then. It has become more elaborate; it has evolved in development, but the bones of it have never changed.

iH: It is quite impressive that the whole film was only built on just a few characters, a two-hour film.

JS: And I don’t think that the movie feels small.

iH: Tsy izany.

JS: Despite that narrow scope.

 

 

iH: And the bar was a tremendous asset along with the bartender.

JS: Martin Sheen did such incredible work. He just seized the role in a way that made it impossible to imagine any other actor playing the part.

iH: He [Arthur] had so much life to him. There was on scene where is was beginning to self-destruct I was upset.

JS: Izaho koa.

iH: And I do not know if I would have been as upset had it been the other two [Pratt & Lawrence].

JS: Right, you feel deeply for him. One of the most exciting things about Arthur is that he has a little journey of his own. From Arthur’s point of view, he is designed to make small talk with a large group of passengers over the course of a few months and then go back to sleep for a century until the next voyage and then banter with a new group of passengers. He has never really gotten to get to know anyone the way that he gets to know Jim and Aurora. He has never talked to anyone for years, and the result is Arthur begins to grow and to become more human to explore new territory in his own being, and Michael got that and portrayed it so gorgeously, that it really illuminates the entire film. He is such an important character.

iH: You wouldn’t know until you actually see him scooting across the floor with no legs, he has evolved that much.

JS: Izay indrindra.

iH: Were you working on Dr. Strange the same time you were working on this film?

JS: Yeah, they overlapped. While this was in prep I was working on Dr. Strange, and then Scott Derrickson took over the writing of Dr. Strange I was on set for Passengers for prep and on set for four months and as they were finishing Dr. Strange they asked me to come back, and I went back and did another six weeks work on the film to finish it and then came back to do post on mpandeha. It was a very busy time over overlap between those two pictures.

iH: Very busy. Two entirely different type of films, it is like flicking that light switch on and off, going back and forth.

JS: Yeah, it was very delightful actually because it was so refreshing to move from one project to another because they are so different.

iH: Dr. Strange, I did see that one, and it was great!

JS: I am so happy the way it turned out.

iH: I am really hit and miss with movies like that. This one really grabbed my attention and I really enjoyed it, it flowed.

JS: At one end of the range of superhero movies especially with huge casts of characters can become like a carnival ride where they are fun but not necessarily deep. You trade away the ability to deeply engage a few characters because the circus is so big. The focus, the stillness, and depth in Dr. Strange really let you get to know one character and his dilemma in a way that I find deeply ratifying, I speak as a very biased observer, but I think it is my favorite Marvel movie.

iH: Sometimes those movies are a bit much. They are overloaded, but this seemed subtle enough to where it kept my focus, and it wasn’t just overpowered, it had good special effects but not overly done to where I did not know what the heck was going on. When you were on set for mpandeha did you change any dialogue on the fly, or was it true to your original concept?

JS: It is very faithful to the script. We certainly did tweak scenes for brevity and actors had notions at times, for Chris or for Jen we would adjust lines in very small ways, mostly the shooting script is represented verbatim on screen. What would happen more often was that we would invent new scenes. So there were few scenes that were written during the production that was about completing emotional arch or finding moments of residence. So there are scenes in the film that we didn’t have in the shooting script going into production. So that was more of the writing duties on set that day it was about, adding material and investing new ways into the parts of their emotional journey.

iH: What about the ending, was that the same?

JS: No, the ending is the thing that has evolved the most. The very ending scene, the epilog has always been present in the film. We took a few different runs, ways to approach it. But something like that has always existed. The action close of the film and the kind of consummation of both the love story and the journey, that is an area where we did right some new material during production. Some of the most satisfying moments of closure at the end of the movie were written while we were shooting.

iH: And it really was a satisfying ending, and that was a major concern of mine. Do you think that you are going to make any other films in the mpandeha realm?

JS: It is very tempting. I shot some viral shots for the film while in production, and it did get me thinking about what else could happen in this universe in this colonial era. Because there are 88 lost years from the time that we see them and their arrival, there is plenty of more room for Jim and Aurora, but I think the most obvious target would be to find other stories in the universe of people leaping from planet to planet.

iH: Jon, thank you so much for speaking to me today. It was truly a pleasure; the movie was perfect. Best of luck and hopefully we receive the opportunity to chat again in the future.

If you enjoyed the interview check out our interviews with mpandeha Production Designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and Editor Maryan Brandon, Tsindrio Eto!

 

 

 

-MOMBA NY MPANORATRA-

Ryan T. Cusick dia mpanoratra ihorror.com ary tena mankafy ny resaka sy ny fanoratana momba ny zavatra rehetra ao anatin'ny karazana horohoro. Nahatonga ny fahalianany voalohany i Horror taorian'ny nijereny ilay voalohany, The Amityville Horror fony izy feno telo taona. Mipetraka any California i Ryan miaraka amin'ny vadiny sy ny zanany vavy iraika ambin'ny folo taona, izay mampiseho ny fahalianany amin'ilay karazana horohoro ihany koa. Vao tsy ela akory izay i Ryan dia nahazo ny mari-pahaizana Master in Psychology ary manana faniriana hanoratra tantara iray. Ryan dia azo arahana ao amin'ny Twitter @ Nytmare112

 

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