You may be familiar with the astronaut training/selection process through movies like THE RIGHT STUFF. But SPACE CADET, written and directed by Liz W. Garcia, explores the space program’s ins and outs through the fun and silly lens of an :ahem: uncommon recruit. Rex (Emma Roberts) is an alligator-wrestling bartender who gave up her dreams of becoming an astronaut due to overwhelming personal challenges. But when her best friend Nadine (Poppy Liu) falsifies Rex’s resume to get her an invitation to join NASA’s astronaut candidate process, Rex has to use her gifts to pass the rigorous testing. But will her natural gifts be enough to get her through recruitment or will this be way over her head?
I had the awesome opportunity to sit down with Garcia to talk about her process making the film, including how much she took from NASA’s astronaut candidate school process and the real-life space experiences she and the cast went through. I also got a great tip that adults can still go to Space Camp… sign me up!
When I was a little kid, I always wanted to go to space camp. And then watching the movie, I was like, I wish I would have gotten to go to space camp!
Garcia: It’s not too late by the way. Huntington, Alabama space camp has some weeks for adults.
How fun! I may just have to do that. So I really liked that at the beginning of the movie, Rex went to go see a space launch and then decided that that’s something she wanted to do. But with life’s circumstances, she wasn’t able to do it. For you, since you’re a director and a writer, was there a movie that you saw as a kid that made you want to get into writing and directing?
Garcia: You know, it’s funny because as a kid, I didn’t even realize directing was a job. I didn’t know anybody in show business. I didn’t understand how it worked. You know, it took me a long time to even understand there was screenwriting. But I loved movies. And the TV that I was allowed to watch, I loved very deeply. And I do remember when I was in 7th grade, I went to a sleepover and someone’s parents had rented ROSEMARY’S BABY for us… thinking it would be appropriate because it was PG-13. But of course, it’s so disturbing.
Oh yes, that’s ’60s PG-13, not today’s PG-13.
Garcia: But that was the first time that I watched a movie and realized that movies were art. That movies were not just recording a story… the camera was being used. Because my mother’s a painter and there are sequences in ROSEMARY’S BABY that are very impressionistic. And it was the first time I realized you can really kind of go crazy in movies, and there’s somebody whose aesthetic is behind this. And that really stayed with me. And it took many, many years after that for me to go… I think that actually directing is the thing that I’ve been working up to in a way. I couldn’t really own that as a goal until I saw that, until I knew of enough other women who were doing it. I didn’t want to be impractical. I didn’t want to be, it seemed, and sometimes still does, so audacious to be like, I’m going to be a director. I’m going to be the boss of this set. Tt took me a while to be like, no, this is my dream.
Another element that I found really funny with the film was how you brought in real elements from the training center. For instance, you pointed out that the candidates are called “asscans”. I Googled that and saw it is actually a real term. Were there other elements that you found in your research that you wanted to incorporate? And can you give some examples of that?
Garcia: The more I researched this world, the more I was like, “this is insane.” I can’t believe it’s real and that these asscans go through this. Some of it we couldn’t do because it was so extreme. For instance, a group of asscans will be dropped in the middle of, say, the Canadian Rockies. It’s so cold that you cannot expose any of your flesh to the cold. And then their instructors will sort of say, like, okay, so please stay alive for the next three days. We can’t help you, but we are watching you. And just to make sure that these are people who can handle functioning as a group in extreme environments. Because they’re up at the space station, floating around, stuck together for months at a time. You know, they have to eliminate the claustrophobes and people who get too irritable. And then there’s all the… they train underwater extensively, wearing spacesuits, wearing spacesuits and huge space gloves underwater and to screw teeny little tiny screws. It’s all this sort of mental torment.
And did you kind of get to go to your own little space camp? Because it seemed like they gave you great access.
Garcia: We shot most of the movie in New Jersey and we built a lot of sets. But then we were so lucky to be able to go down to the Air and Space Museum in Huntsville, Alabama and use their campus and facilities… so everything that they’re using to put these kids through space camp, many of whom grow up and become astronauts. Yes, it’s fun, but it also is where young people who have an interest in space exploration go and spend their summers. So we were able to use their track and their spinning contraption. Terrifying. We got a lot of value out of that location. And being down there all together definitely felt like we were at camp.
I also thought it was cool how in the interview boardroom, you had the three seemingly real astronauts. I loved the shot of them sitting with their official astronaut portraits behind them.
Garcia: I can’t believe you noticed that. That makes me so happy! So two of them are actually our producers. So that was just kind of a little joke that they’re pretending to be astronauts. And then one of them is this guy, Mike Massimino, who’s an incredibly accomplished astronaut, and he’s a professor at Columbia. And he’s very good on camera; he was on THE BIG BANG THEORY. He’s much more comfortable in front of a camera than I would ever be. But he wrote a memoir called Spaceman that really, really helped me write this script because it’s his life story on becoming an astronaut. And he’s a very, very humble, funny guy. So it’s really the story of somebody who struggled. He’s open about things like not understanding the class he was was taking at MIT and flunking and not thinking he could do it. Which I so appreciate because when you think about astronauts, you think about these perfect human beings. So it was really fun to get him then in that scene.
So that leads into my next question about your writing process. How much research did you have to do? Because I was also thinking about you during all the scenes with the math formulas. I was wondering if it was legit.
So I had to do a tremendous amount of research because I knew nothing about this process. And there’s not one website that tells you what goes on. So I read a bunch of memoirs. There were some blogs that some astronauts had kept when they were in an isolation habitat on the side of a volcano in Hawaii. That’s what I modeled the sequence when they’re all stuck in that sort of terradome. And then our production designer, in order to have the sets be convincing and have the formulas be correct… she had to do so much research. There are certain things where obviously took massive creative liberties, but you also want to create as real an environment as you can because you want the stakes to feel as high as they actually feel for people who are going through this process.
Absolutely. And so since you were the writer and the director were there a lot of changes that you made based on whether or not you were going to make your day? Do you think it would be different if you were directing something that you didn’t write?
Garcia: The good thing about being both is that you’re not at war with somebody. You’re not turning to the screenwriter going, “Look, we don’t have enough money to do that sequence.” And they’re folding their arms and saying, “Screw you. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The great thing is, it’s my problem if it’s not working. It’s my problem to solve. Which means I can solve the problem how I want to.
That’s a lot of pressure too.
Garcia: It’s pressure, but really, the most pressure is when you are alone in a room with a blank page and you’ve got this idea in your head and you have set a lofty goal for yourself. You know if you do it right, it could be a good movie. But you’re about 112 pages away from that. That’s what’s really hard. Once you’re in prep, where you have to make a bunch of changes because the budget’s becoming real and the schedule and yada yada, you’re surrounded by people who are supporting you to make the movie. You’re not alone with a blank page anymore. You’ve got people who, in the case of this movie, almost everyone around me was more experienced than I was. This is my third movie. And so at that point, it just feels like a gift to be able to make the movie at all.
Absolutely. Well thank you so much for talking with me. I could talk to you about movies all day.
Garcia: Thanks so much!
