‘The point is ambition’: are we ready to follow Netflix into space?
The rise of commercial space travel is here, and for the vast majority who cannot afford its millions-plus price tag, streaming platforms are here to capture it. Starting this week, Netflix will air the first two installments of Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, its first docuseries to cover an event – SpaceX’s launch of its first all-civilian crew on a three-day trip circling Earth – in “near real time”. Subsequent episodes will document the four astronauts’ preparation for the 15 September launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Episodes three and four will air just two days prior; a feature-length finale film of the mission itself will air in late September.
The series, directed by veteran sports documentarian Jason Hehir, best known for The Last Dance, promises to take audiences behind the scenes of the Inspiration4 mission, from the astronaut selection to the training and eventual takeoff. Netflix, as well as the passengers and SpaceX figures introduced in the first two episodes, are billing the trip as a paradigm shift in space exploration: an aperture in commercial space travel, a small but significant advancement toward the proliferation of rocket transportation, and a new frontier for reality television.
“Inspiration4 is just a really small step along that journey toward a Jetsons world where everyone’s going to jump in their spacecraft and journey in the worlds beyond ours,” Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old billionaire chief executive of Shift4 Payments and longtime flight enthusiast who will be the mission’s commander, told the Guardian. “I don’t think it’s just going to be a few people for a long time,” he added, comparing space travel now, executed by private companies such as Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic with exorbitant price tags, to the early days of experimental aviation. “This is starting with a few, for sure, but this going to open up to the many.”
Until then, commercial space travel remains an ultra-expensive, ultraexclusive club predominantly spurred by the mega-rich, with live streams for everyone else. In July, Blue Origin livestreamed its launch of Jeff Bezos on a 11-minute suborbital space journey on its YouTube channel and on Amazon Prime; Virgin Galactic also streamed founder Richard Branson’s 59-minute space flight on YouTube, and recruited a popular science TikTok star for a future trip. It’s a given, as the environmentally questionable business of space tourism continues to expand, that reality TV will ride along – in April, Nasa signed a Space Act Agreement with the production company “Space Hero” to “[facilitate] initial cooperation and information sharing” for a competition show that would send the winner on an expensive trip to the International Space Station as early as 2023.
There’s a gameshow undercurrent to Countdown, the Netflix series, whose first two episodes predominantly serve to introduce viewers to the civilian astronauts, selected by a Willy Wonkalike arbitrary process tied to four core mission values.
Besides Isaacman (“Leadership”), who declined to specify the amount paid to participate in the mission (but did say proceeds raised for the pediatric cancer specialists at St Jude’s children’s research hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, would exceed the cost of the mission), the group includes Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old pediatric cancer survivor and physician assistant at St Jude’s, which nominated her to symbolize the value of “Hope”; Sian Proctor, 51, of Phoenix, Arizona, a geology professor who won a spot on Inspiration4 through a competition assessing entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to go semi-viral (“Prosperity”); and Chris Sembrowski, 42, a data engineer and air force veteran from Everett, Washington, selected off a list of donors to St Jude’s as part of Inspiration4’s Superbowl campaign (“Generosity”).
All are new to astrodynamics, ordinary figures unused to cameras and spotlight. It’s a far cry from Hehir’s mission on The Last Dance, in which his team endeavored to “de-iconize” a celebrity as ubiquitous and iconic as Michael Jordan. Though Countdown will build, in real time, the iconography of Inspiration4, Hehir assures that the project is not acting as gauzy PR for the company – “I didn’t see it as our role to aggrandize SpaceX,” he told the Guardian. “I thought it was necessary to outline what their mission is, why are we doing this – because one of the first questions is always that it’s another billionaire going to space, what’s the point? The point is ambition, seeing what else is out there, and the point in a charitable sense is raising $200m for St Jude’s.”
This is the most common criticism levied at SpaceX, and private space travel in general, one Hehir floats midway through the first episode – why send, or care about, billionaires going to space when there’s an abundance of earthbound issues that need addressing, most pressingly the climate emergency. Asked his response to such backlash, Isaacman echoed his answer in the first episode of the series: “We absolutely believe in balance here,” he said. “It’s been right from the start, from the creation of Inspiration4, that we’ve said: ‘we have to address some of the problems of today to earn the right to make progress for tomorrow,’” pointing to the
fundraising effort for St Jude’s.
SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, appears in the first episode for brief overviews on the mission of Inspiration4 (civilian orbital space flight) and the company at large (colonization of Mars). It was “necessary to have [Musk] in it,” Hehir said, “because he is the face of that company and I felt that we owe it to our viewers for him to do two things. One, to articulate what the company’s mission is, and then two, to address the criticism that is so pervasive these days, of billionaires going into space and the privilege of wealth.” (Musk’s answer to the billionaire-critique is that “99%-plus of our economy should be dedicated to solving problems on Earth” but a multiplanet, space-bearing civilization is an “exciting, inspiring future”.)
“I had no interest in mythologizing that company or making it out that they’re saviors of the world,” Hehir said. “But I do think it’s important if you’re going to understand the ambition of the mission, to understand the ambition of the company itself.”
If all goes according to plan, the final episode, turned around on a snap days-long production timeline, will capture the Inspiration4’s crew successful return to Earth. The first two episodes find each weighing the inherent risk of space travel; Proctor, in particular, remembers watching the Challenger disaster when a shuttle exploded on live television in 1986, killing all seven crew on board (captured on camera: the shock and grief of Grace and Edward Corrigan, whose daughter Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire, was to be the first American civilian in space).
“I understand what calculated risk is and what the reward is,” she told the Guardian, “and the reward of human space flight far exceeds the risk.”
Proctor, who was born in Guam, where her father worked for Nasa at an Apollo tracking station, will be only the fourth black American woman ever to travel to space (to date, only about 600 people have made the journey). Bubbling with a Ms Frizzle-esque enthusiasm for space exploration, Proctor is using to her spot aboard Inspiration4 to highlight black women’s long-overlooked role in American space travel. “We’re opening up the door for people who normally would have thought of being an astronaut or going to space, giving them the insight into how we’re doing it, and how times are changing,” she said of participating in the first allcivilian space flight.
“Old space was exclusive and you had to be the best of the best, you had to fit certain criteria. This is new space that’s emerging, that enables us to open up who gets to go and participate and write the narrative of human space flight,” she added, mapping out what she called a “Jedi” space — Just, Equitable, Diverse and Inclusive.
It remains to be seen if that narrative of a more democratic space will come to pass – and if Inspiration4 will push past skepticism of ultra-expensive, privately funded space flight. Regardless, the mission, and the messaging attached to it, will be televised, bringing the vast frontier to your personal screen.
Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space starts 7 September on Netflix
to put on plays by unknown foreign writers; fortunately, however, Laurence Boswell was programming a series of adventurous seasons at the Ustinov studio theatre in Bath and had decided, in 2014, to launch a season of new European work. So, in that year, I translated both plays, with a strong recommendation, both to Florian and to Laurence, that the play chosen to introduce Florian to the English-speaking world should be The Father. They agreed.
We opened at the Ustinov in October 2014, with an exceptional cast headed by Kenneth Cranham and Lia Williams in an exquisite production by James Macdonald. The reviews, across the board, were perhaps the best for any piece of work I’ve ever been involved in; but, for a while, the future of the play in English seemed to hang in the balance. Its ostensibly grim subject matter was felt to be a possible deterrent to audiences. Luckily, the Tricycle (now the Kiln) stepped in, the start of a relationship with the theatre that subsequently saw them stage the other two panels of Florian’s triptych (The Mother and The Son). The considerable success of the transfer led to two runs in the West End, in 2015 and 2016, respectively, which sealed the success of the play and won for Kenneth Cranham a very well-deserved Olivier award.
The Father travelled on to the US, where the central part was played in New York by Frank Langella (who won his fourth Tony for the role) and, on the west coast, by Alfred Molina. And matters might have rested there, were it not for the fact that, at some point along the way, Florian had conceived the desire to turn the play into a film, which he also wanted to direct.
This was easier said than done. Apart from anything else, there had already been, in 2015, a French film (with
Jean Rochefort) called Floride, based on the play. In normal circumstances, that would have been the end of the discussion. But, remarkably, the producers of the film, Jean-Louis Livi and Philippe Carcassonne (coincidentally, Philippe had been one of the producers and prime-movers of Carrington, my own debut film as a director) proved very open to the idea. Hard (well, all right, impossible) to imagine a similar scenario being played out in the UK (or the US) – a remake, with a first-time director, of a not conspicuously successful film released only three years earlier – but Philippe and Jean-Louis seemed entirely sanguine about the risks involved. And Florian invited me to collaborate with him on the script.
We began by laying down a few general principles. Both of us were determined, more than anything else, that the film should be cinematic and give off no whiff of the theatre. Usually, the way to achieve this when turning a play into a film (one of the trickiest of transitions) is deemed to be a question of “opening out” the play into a multiplicity of locations so that it seems more intrinsically visual. But, in this case, the story – that of a man struggling to retain his grasp on reality as he slips helplessly into dementia – did not encourage this approach. It was more, we reasoned, a question of, so to speak, opening it in, so that the erratic consciousness, the failure to understand time and events our hero is suffering under might become more and more powerfully claustrophobic.
Once the broad approach had been agreed, Florian wrote the first draft in French and I countered with a second draft, translated into English with some added suggestions and modifications. Florian wrote a third draft, again in French, incorporating some of these and making further changes, and I translated again to arrive at a fourth draft. Finally, we met for a few days in Paris and negotiated our way through a fifth and final draft. My initial instincts had been to take advantage of the medium in a slightly more elaborate way, creating perhaps more strikingly hallucinatory effects, but Florian’s work combines extremely original ideas with a rigorous simplicity of execution. It’s a very rare sort of cocktail, the effectiveness of which I came to appreciate more and more as we worked on the script.
The final stage was to find some actors for the film. Florian’s unwavering determination to cast Anthony Hopkins had already led us to set the film in London and change the main character’s name from André to Anthony.
That was the easy bit. I had, in the mists of time, done two films already with Anthony: my first script to be filmed (based on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House) in 1973 and a Mike Newell film in the mid-80s called, strangely enough, The Good Father, which still seems to me to have nailed down that era pretty precisely. So there was existing goodwill – but all depended on Anthony’s reaction to the screenplay. This, fortunately, was overwhelmingly positive and, before long, Florian and I found ourselves heading to Los Angeles to meet him. Within five minutes of sitting down to breakfast, he had enthusiastically committed to the part. The next morning, Florian and I went into the agency CAA, where the agents of just about every major actress you can think of came, one by one, to have an audience with Florian and offer their client as co-star. It was Florian’s first visit to LA. Afterwards, I felt obliged to warn him that not all his future trips to Hollywood would necessarily play out in this way. On our return to Europe, after some thought, Florian offered the part to Olivia Colman.
And that, you might have thought, was that. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that the climate had so definitively changed that – even with this spectacular cast, even with the worldwide success of the play and even with an exceedingly modest budget (approximately what I had been given for Carrington in 1994) – the film would prove almost impossibly difficult to finance. Just as when we’d been trying to bring the play into London, people would shake their heads judiciously and wonder whether this was the kind of subject audiences would want to turn out to see.
Unlike Florian, whose beloved grandmother died of Alzheimer’s when he was an adolescent, I’ve been lucky enough to have had no direct family experience of dementia. My two most inspirational teachers, however, men who devoted their lives to weighing and discriminating the subtleties of language and literature, both, by a savage irony, fell victim to this brutal condition. Most of us have or will be affected by it one way or another, and people’s reluctance to reopen these kinds of wounds is, of course, understandable. But Florian and I have both had a great many responses from those who said they had had to force themselves to watch the film, but then found that the accuracy with which the condition is portrayed and the rounded humanity of the performances had, in the end, been a real consolation to them.
Ultimately, though, The Father stands or falls as a film, not a treatise. I can’t speak entirely objectively, needless to say, but I am proud to be associated with a piece of work that ploughs its own original furrow subject to no outside pressures, absolutely reflecting its creators’ intentions – and filmed, miraculously, in 25 days, in the prelapsarian early summer of 2019.
•The Father is out now on digital platforms, Blu-Ray and DVD.