WHY ON EARTH?
Hawley reverses narrative and explores big questions
Cinemas are full of space-set dramas this year. Two of them — Noah Hawley’s Lucy in the Sky and Alice Winocour’s Proxima — screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Shortly afterward came James Gray’s Ad Astra. Earlier in the year, Richard Dreyfuss starred in Astronaut.
Hawley, who directed Natalie Portman and Jon Hamm in Lucy in the Sky, has a very down-to-earth theory for the high number of astro-flicks.
“Part of it may just be that the technology of the visual effects has now allowed us to tell these stories at a low enough cost that you can make a drama out of it,” he says.
“But I do think there’s something else, if you think about what space represents — leaving the planet and transcending from this earthbound mess. As our world feels more conflicted and messier, maybe we are all looking to the stars, like ‘get me off this damned planet.’”
He adds that Earth-orbit offers “a way to look at life on Earth from an elevated point of view. What are we doing down here? Why can’t we escape our insecurities and our bad choices and evolve to a species that can really take to the skies?”
Portman stars as Lucy Cola, who suffers an existential crisis after returning home on a space shuttle. The film opens with her on a spacewalk, then continues back on Earth as she prepares for another mission, and falls into an affair with a fellow astronaut, played by Hamm.
It’s a reversal of the usual order of space-travel narratives, which tend to focus on the voyage outward, with the return as the conclusion. “I’m not sure there really have been any dramas that start in space ... a movie that takes that astronaut experience and then brings it back to Earth as to what the coming home is like,” says Hawley.
“We also know that’s your only time — you might never do it again.” To date, fewer than 600 people have been to space, while those who have been more than once are a fraction of that number.
“It’s a profound experience, and people are changed by profound experiences,” says the director. “You’re going to a place that’s hostile to human life and so many things can go wrong, but once you’re up there it’s a celestial experience.”
Lucy in the Sky is based loosely on the story of Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut who flew on the space shuttle in 2006, but shortly after her return to Earth was charged with the attempted kidnapping of her former lover’s new girlfriend.
“It’s what I would call true-story-adjacent,” Hawley says of his film, which departs from the details of Nowak’s life in several respects. (Nowak was said to have worn an astronaut diaper during a cross-country drive to the scene of her alleged crime.)
“The real story was more of a jumping-off point for me. It was a ‘why’ question. Why would someone go up there and then come back and make these choices? It’s a story of a woman’s existential crisis, and the mistakes she makes in her search for a feeling, to get back to a feeling. The point of this movie was to restore that dignity and that humanity.”
He continues: “When you listen to a lot of astronauts and you read the memoirs ... you realize that we don’t send poets into space. We send very left-brain engineer types who are trained to solve problems, and they’re trained to ask a lot of questions like what, where, how — but not why. Why is not a question that they are required to ask.
“And what happens when there’s a why question? You come home and think: ‘Why are we here?’ And you’re not equipped to answer that.”