THE MIDNIGHT SKY
George Clooney: no stranger to global catastrophe after Batman And Robin. (Ah, we love you really, Georgey.)
GET ME SOMEONE WHO CAN WRITE ABOUT A guy tramping through the snow!” a cigar-chomping producer bellows into his phone. You could be forgiven for wondering if that’s how Mark L Smith got the gig on Netflix movie The Midnight Sky, given that it’s similarly snow-shrouded to his Oscarwinning frontiersman tale The Revenant. But there’s much more to the story than that. For starters, half of it unfolds in the even chillier environs of space.
Based on Lily Brooks-dalton’s 2017 novel Good Morning, Midnight, it’s set in 2049, and centres on Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney, who also directs), an astronomer based at a remote Arctic station. When a humanity-ending global catastrophe (something to do with the atmosphere) strikes, his colleagues fly off to be with their families at the end.
But Lofthouse – who’s dying from cancer – stays behind, using the little time left to him to try and contact the Aether: a space vessel returning from a recently discovered moon of Jupiter, whose crew includes Felicity Jones’s Sully. This involves a perilous journey to another station – accompanied by Iris (Caoilinn Springall), a close-mouthed young girl who’s somehow been left behind…
It was the writer’s manager who brought the book to him. He was immediately smitten. “I just fell in love with the characters and the world,” Smith tells SFX. “Lily Brooksdalton is such a wonderful writer. I love stories that strip away a lot of the technology, like a Revenant situation, where it’s man against nature, and man against himself.
“This provided that, in a way, because of Augustine being in the Arctic. But it was also the relationship between Augustine and the little girl, Iris. There’s something so special there, as you watch that grow, and watch where it leads. At the same time it’s bouncing back and forth to the crew on Aether, and the relationships there. So it was really the characters that pulled me into this. Everything for me starts with character.”
This doesn’t mean the story made its way to the screen untouched, of course. The basic plot is the same, but the writer did make some tweaks. “The novel was quieter, and a little slower moving, and not quite as big,” Smith explains. “We took the characters and set-ups and added some fun
action. He goes on this journey in the novel as well, but it’s more of a vacation trip. They don’t go through any of the dangers – we added all of that. And there’s less of a feel of the pressure of having to get there now – it’s much more of a relaxed story.”
In this version Clooney’s character ends up, for example, zooming about on a snowmobile, and being plunged into sub-zero waters when the ice breaks. Everything’s better with extra snowmobile, we observe – it’s one of the rules of screenwriting. “Yeah, exactly. That’s it!” Smith laughs.
The Midnight Sky remains an unorthodox post-apocalypse, though, far from your standard Roland Emmerich blockbuster. No landmarks are trashed. The protagonist isn’t fighting for their own survival, as there’s no hope of that. And the apocalypse occurs off-screen, and isn’t the focus. It’s barely even clear what form it takes.
“We were trying to lean into an Arctic version of Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road,” Smith says. “It’s like: we’re not really sure what happened. In the novel, it’s even more vague: it’s left open-ended as to whether it’s a pandemic, or a nuclear situation, or things like that. So we tried to kind of drag that on. It’s less about the event than the after-effects.”
Once the project was set up at Netflix, the next task was finding a suitable director. “We were trying to work out what director could get the actor we were looking for,” Smith explains, “And it was like, ‘Well, we all want George Clooney as Augustine. What director would he like to work with? We didn’t initially think of him for it, because it was a very different kind of thing for him. So we sent it to him almost on a whim – a ‘fingers crossed’ situation. And it all worked out!”
Though Clooney came on board after there was a finished screenplay, he did make valuable contributions. “We have a big spacewalk scene, and he made that a little bigger, and stuff,” Smith notes. He also suggested one of the neatest bits of tech, which sees the Aether’s crew immersing themselves in holographic recordings of loved ones – so they can, say, sit down with a bowl of cereal and pretend they’re eating breakfast in their kitchen back home. It’s an innovation you can easily see supplanting Facetime one day.
“The way I’d written it, the crew members were having interactions with people on Earth, but it was very delayed, and everything in my script had it being more standard stuff: video calls, radio signal messages, things like that. George had this genius idea of making it a Vr-type situation, so the crew were able to interact with versions of their family. It’s such
We were trying to lean into an Arctic version of Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road
a smart thing. I told him I was mad at myself for not thinking of it, because it made you care more not only about the crew members, but about their families.”
Smith was keen for everything to feel “feasible” and “authentic”. So the Aether has artificial gravity (thanks, presumably, to centripetal force) and biodomes (reminiscent of Silent Running), and suffers from realistic communications issues.
“I wrote a Star Trek with Tarantino, and that was a sci-fi script on which I could have fun and lean into some bigger, broader things. We wanted this to be in the future, but not so far in the future that anyone would feel that it couldn’t be happening. I went through a lot of different TED talks as far as the planets that would be chosen, and the way the ship would have to operate,” he adds. “As they’re going through space, I kept it where they go into blackout zones: they lose communication for a few weeks, so all the messages they were getting from home were at least a couple of weeks behind. Sure, I cheated in a few areas, but nothing major. It wasn’t like anyone was being beamed up!”
COLD DISCOMFORT
Location filming took place amid the snowy vistas of Iceland. The writer wasn’t required to be hands-on, but was offered the opportunity to get his snow boots on.
“Clooney asked me to come down when they were up in Reykjavik: ‘Come visit! Ride snowmobiles!’” Smith recalls. “Then he immediately sends me a video where it’s 50 degrees below zero, and the winds were going 50 miles an hour! So I don’t think he really wanted me to come visit, he was being nice. ‘I’m good, George – thanks!’
“But I went over to London [at Shepperton Studios] when they were on a nice warm stage, and watched when they were shooting the spacewalk stuff. That was really cool to watch, because I’ve never done a film with that many effects before.”
Arriving now, as Covid-19 rages on, The Midnight Sky feels even more pertinent than it did when first conceived. It’s in large part about isolation, loneliness and the importance of human connection. Disaster also forces Augustine, a childless singleton who’s clearly a workaholic, to consider what’s really important in life. Such themes have acquired even more resonance as we collectively trudge towards 2021. It must be weird for the writer, we suggest.
“Oh, absolutely!” Smith says. “Clooney and I, we’ve talked about it a lot. It’s so bizarre. When we started this, the world seemed normal – I mean, as normal as it could feel, with everything going on politically. Then the pandemic hit, and it felt so similar. We were always dealing with an idea of environmental stuff as well, so that was always a discussion. But yes: it’s very strange, and kind of eerie and sad, that in a way the world does feel familiar.”
Fingers crossed, The Midnight
Sky will feel a little less painfully relevant come the spring… For now, consider it a means to work through some of your Covid-inspired issues. But with added snowmobile action.