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Interview: ‘Good Night Oppy’ director Ryan White brings Mars back to Earth

Good Night Oppy
Amazon

Documentary filmmaker Ryan White has always sought out stories of ordinary people interacting with the extraordinary. You might remember his documentary Good Ol’ Frieda, about the Beatles’ secretary, but it goes even further than that. His last film, Assassins, followed the incredible case of two South Korean women who were unwittingly used as pawns in a game of international espionage run by the DPRK, and arguably expanded the scope of his storytelling to an even wider view. But with his latest film, Good Night Oppy, he’s gone cosmic. White tells the well-known story of NASA’s Opportunity and Spirit rovers through the perspective of the engineers and scientists who worked on the mission from its humble beginnings as a germ of an idea in a lab to the rovers being launched in 2004, all the way until Opportunity — which long outlasted its initial six-month mission — shut down in 2018. In collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic, White brings Mars home to the viewer and places us in both the control room at NASA and on the rocky surface of the Red Planet.

Vanyaland had the chance to speak with White while he was in town for a screening of the film a few weeks ago, and his conversation is nearly as good as the film itself. Our chat has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Nick Johnston: So, first off, I’d like to say that I really loved the film.

Ryan White: Thank you.

It’s such an interesting and moving doc, and I can only imagine what it must have been like to see it at TIFF. I was there this year and I wasn’t able to check it out while I was on the ground, but I imagine seeing that at the Cinesphere [Editor’s Note: A large IMAX dome on Toronto’s waterfront] with all the NASA folks who were involved in Opportunity’s mission over the years.

Have you been to the Cinesphere before?

Never. I could not make it down there, and I’m so bummed I missed it – I heard about it all through the festival. But when watching it at home, it seems like it would fill up that IMAX screen well. You have this big scale, I guess, compared to a lot of the other projects you’ve done. I only mean that in the sense of the logistics of making the film.

Yeah, no, I hear you.

Through effects work, through all that, and the length of time. When you’re looking at something like a film like Assassins or whatnot, obviously, it’s just a really different kind of feel. How’d you come to be involved in a project like this specifically?

Yeah. Assassins was, I think, the last feature film, at least, that I made before this one. Assassins is a really good example of what I love about my job. It’s some wild story that’s unfolding before your eyes. I made a film about Dr. Ruth, when she was looking back on her life when she was about to turn 90. I like vérité filmmaking. I like following something unfolding. I’ve never been really interested in doing historical or retrospective films. I’ve done a couple, but this one came to me after Opportunity had died. I remember a tweet went viral in 2019 and it was Opportunity’s last communication to Earth saying. “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” I remember seeing that and being gutted and I think that’s why it went viral. I think it was a universal gut punch to people of like, oh, there’s a robot on Mars that’s in trouble? I remember being really emotionally moved by that, but I didn’t think, let’s make a film about it.

A year after that Film45 and Amblin Entertainment came to me and said, “We’re interested in making a documentary about Opportunity’s life. Would you be interested?” I’ve always been a massive space geek. Growing up, I don’t think this is rare, but always wanted to be an astronaut. Always. Filmmaker and astronaut were my two things. Even when I’m like, I’m talking five or six, those were the things that I wanted to be, and I just hadn’t ever found a space story, because I’d been pitched a lot over the years and we always said no to them. I hadn’t found one that really, I don’t know, moved me in the way that I wanted to spend a few years working on it. When they pitched it to me I was like, sign me up. That was actually March 2020, at the beginning COVID.

Yeah. I can only imagine all of the COVID stuff you’ve dealt with — you had an archive of footage that makes up the bulk of the film. The stuff around 2020 is what you probably shot where a crew was on hand. But it’s crazy how much footage that was captured to preserve this project even before your arrival, especially because of how long of a time span it runs. Does NASA normally have that kind of obsessive documentation over the years?

Yeah, they have embedded filmmakers, and NASA are documentarians unto themselves. They had an embedded cinematographer. His name is John Beck Kaufman and he’s credited in our film. He shot most of that archival himself. He was a JPL employee, basically, for the entire mission and would shoot it all. The techs are all used to having cameras around them all the time. But one of the biggest tasks was taking almost a thousand hours of footage and then having to watch it, because it wasn’t like it came in a way that was super organized or had a play by play of what was on each tape. It really was a treasure hunt and looking for moments or people or scenes. I’m a vérité filmmaker. I know what it’s like to film day to day on something and you end up with a lot of boring footage, because you don’t know when something is going to happen. It was a lot of people on my team having to watch a whole day of people just looking at computers where nothing happens. I’m finding that one moment when ABBA’s “SOS” plays.

***

Absolutely. Now, that’s one thing I’ll get back to in just a second. But I just wanted to say, it’s interesting because the way you use the footage in the movie, it’s hard. The reason I ask this is because it’s hard to tell that it wasn’t just Boyhood-style shot alongside the project, because it just feels so well put together and is able maintaining this emotional arc that you’re trying to give it throughout that whole span.

Now, as for the songs, there’s so much that goes into characterizing both Opportunity and Spirit through Angela Bassett’s narration and through the way the NASA hive mind works with all these different distinct personalities who are all bringing some talent to the table. How do you merge those two narratives? You’ve got the one narrative of the NASA side. Obviously, they’re linked. You’ve got Opportunity’s journey and then you’ve got the journeys on the ground and constant figuring out of the engineering problems and all that stuff.

Yeah. I think the most common conversation in the edit room always featured the verb “anthropomorphized.” It’s impossible to say — there’s so many syllables (laughs) — but we were always checking ourselves to make sure we weren’t anthropomorphizing the robot in a way that the humans that worked on them weren’t willing to. We were always saying, well, we always have to err on the side of them and if they’re going to anthropomorphize the robot, we can do that, but we can’t take creative license and do that ourselves. To the degree of NASA consulted on the film in the sense that we were showing them imagery.

We were showing them an animation to say, “Okay, we have the robot’s head moving this way. Is that possible?” If they said it was impossible, we changed it. These are massive special effects. but they’re extremely rooted in reality and authenticity, to the point where I probably drove Industrial Light & Magic crazy because they don’t work in a documentary way where we like to pivot at the last second and be like, can you change this little thing? Because it’s not working. They were amazing to work with in that way. They were very patient with me in saying, “Okay, we’ll change it.”

That’s really cool.

RW: Does it matter? I’m like, it matters.

Yeah, you don’t want that Neil Degrasse Tyson tweet.

[laughs]

Working with ILM must have been such a crazy experience. They’re such an iconic effects company.

Legendary.

I think you answered some of this earlier, but, how do you as an artist work with this other group of artists who have a different applied skillset? I guess a good parallel is how you talk about the scientists and the engineers butting against each other with their goals and the practical reality of how to achieve the, and I feel like that’s what the relationship is often like between the creatives and the visual effects people.

It was a total collaboration. I think documentary directors get way too much authorship of their films. That’s one of my favorite parts about my job are the collaborations. I’m not normally working with an ILM, but I’m always collaborating with other artists, whether it’s my composer or my editors or my VPs. That was fun. It was so fun working with ILM, because the conversation from the very beginning was, my vision for the film always was “I want to take the audience to Mars.” Even in my first dinner when I was being interviewed for the job and I was saying to Amblin, “Is that possible? I don’t want to make a cartoon. This is real. I want to take the audience to Mars in a documentary way.” They were like, “Well, we know the best people to talk to.”

So they set me up on a call with ILM and I asked them if they could. “I don’t want to do this if you don’t think you can pull it off,” because it’s not like they can mock up something quickly as a proof-of-concept. That takes years to create. And they were like, “We have never done this before. We’ve never created a photo-real Mars, but we can. We’re capable of doing it.” That was fun. That was the summer of 2020 and it wasn’t even until a few months ago that we’re seeing the final renders of these images, but it was a real jumping off a cliff together and a lot of trust on both sides.

Mars has always had a pretty big hold on our imaginations, but specifically I think in the cinematic sense.

We used to have a whole part of our film going through that. I loved it, but we just had to cut a lot of backstory of portrayals of Mars and films from the ’30s and ’50s. It was a great scene.

I’m just trying to think, aside from the photorealism that you went for on Mars itself, were there any cinematic expressions or depictions of the red planet that you looked to as a guiding influence?

Yeah. I watched all of the sci-fi movies about Mars, dating back to even when The Twilight Zone did an episode about it about it. I watched The Martian a bunch in leading up to the film. But no. There’s documentaries about Mars that I watched a lot and there had been some previous docs about some of these missions that I watched, but I would say nothing, no Mars film served… Mars, this was a challenge. Mars is pretty boring. It all looks pretty similar, even Spirit and Opportunity’s world, even though they’re separate sides of the planet, they look pretty similar, which was a challenge, because in an ideal world Spirit would’ve had blue sand and Opportunity would’ve had red sand, and you would know which character you’re with. The bigger cinematic inspirations where the films that I watched growing up. ET is my favorite film. It was my favorite film as a little boy. It’s still my favorite film.

I remember when Amblin pitched this to me and it’s so cool. On our poster we have the Amblin emblem with ET in the basket and I’m pinch myself when I see it because I think I’m dreaming. But that was, to me, the closest comp. When I was pitching the film, I said, I would say it’s like ET meets Wall-E meets Her. I watched Her a lot while I was making this film, too. I love that movie. I love everything about that film, but I loved especially that idea of the connection between artificial intelligence and humans. But ET especially, with the narrative arc of that film, which is pretty simple even though it’s an adventure on Mars. It’s an unhuman character that you want your audience to fall in love with or bond with. And then at the end, that character you have to say goodbye to. That character is not going to be alive or with you, in ET’s case, by the time the movie is over. It’s was always that three act structure to me, even though it is a doc and it’s a true story.

Exactly. You can see the influences of all three of those I think in there. It is just wonderfully cinematic. It’s very poetic in a way I think a lot of people can get and very moving. I think it’s just interesting there’s a bunch of metaphorical places that you go. Obviously, the one that I think of just sitting here and talking about it now is that it reflects, I guess, the process of making a film in some way. We’re obvious the final product and you all are just coming together and then ultimately, you have to let your child out into the world.

That brings me to the second one, parenthood. You get so many people in this film expressing this close kinship to this thing that they’ve created and put out and have done incredible things with. I’m just wondering, I think, if that expression ultimately, is that the thing that we always just go for when we make things? Do we always just want to leave a tangible impact? Not everybody has to go to Mars, but it’s nice when your shed is able to stand up in the backyard.

Are you a parent?

No.

Oh, okay. Me neither.

I have a cat and a dog. That’s about it.

I have a dog. Well, just speaking of, another inspiration is I love dog films. The films from my childhood like Turner & Hooch. Those are not seen as great pieces of cinema, but I love those types of stories. Old Yeller, I watched a lot as a kid. But I am a dog dad. I was the only producer that wasn’t a parent. Everybody else has kids. Even the people in my film, we do a few backstories of parenthood, but a lot of them, we don’t go to the backstory. Jennifer Trosper, who’s one of the leads. She was there from the beginning. She’s one of the older women in the film. Well, she’s not old, she’s like 50, but she was there even before Opportunity and Spirit. She has four kids. She’s a badass working mother, but they have Opportunity up on their refrigerators next to their kids’ school portraits.

That to me was surprising. You would think that scientists and engineers are very detached and very unemotional, even if they’ve created a robot. That was very surprising, but a very pleasant surprise was that idea. They used the word love and it’s not even a living, breathing thing. It’s not even a dog. What’s interesting, too, is I remember asking them, so there’s Opportunity and Spirit on Mars, but then they have their doppelgängers on Earth, which are called the test beds. I remember asking Abby, the one tech that was the high school scientist during the launch and is now a lead scientist in the program. I’m like, “Do you bond to the test beds?” She’s like, “No.” She was like, but they’re machine. They have to be plugged into the wall. They’re not autonomous or in control of them. It was like, oh, this is so interesting psychologically that you’re really bonded to this robot on Mars, but the exact replica on Earth, you don’t have an emotional attachment to. She’s like, “That was our baby. It’s been sent off. This is engineering. This is used to solve problems, it’s not a creature.”

Like a crash test dummy.

RW: Yeah. I remember her saying, “It has to be plugged into the wall. It does not have solar power. We have to charge it. It has a plug and if it’s not plugged in, it’s not working.” I remember that being such an interesting embodiment of why are you so bonded to one thing and not something that’s completely identical? But I think that that’s the adventure. They’re bonded to it because the robot on Mars is doing what they can’t do themselves, so they are literally seeing Mars through the robot’s eyes.

Exactly. That’s super cool.

Yeah. And the test bed is not. [laughs]

There’s an interesting thread that runs through the stories we tell about space flight. There’s, I think, a notion of sacrifice embedded within them. Not even just in the sense of being away from your family or doing all that training, but literally dying or sacrificing yourself for to quote, I guess, the Apollo 11 mission statement, “for all mankind,” for the benefit of all of us. Here, you have these robots and you have this situation where they’re thousands of miles away and trapped. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, I kept flashing back to the Mercury astronauts, the people who died on the launchpads when rockets exploded and things like that. I’m wondering through the tales of, say, Opportunity and Spirit and through even Laika, the Soviet space dog, are using these sorts of non-human beings and objects, some intelligences, and some not, our way of understanding the potentials for tragedy in the name of exploration and trying to empathetically prepare ourselves for what’s to come?

Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I would love in our lifetimes if we see humans go to Mars, but that’s part of the current rover’s mission. That isn’t Perseverance’s main focus, but it’s a huge part of the reason why she’s up there. Her scientific mission is finding ancient microbial life, but her technological mission is like, can we get something back off of Mars at some point? Do you know about that?

No.

The idea is that Perseverance is leaving test tubes all around Mars of samples, and the idea is to get a spacecraft there soon. In the next 10 years that we’ll be able to land, pick up those test tubes, and then launch back into space, which no one has ever done for Martian soil because of the gravity, but it’s going to be a small rocket. But they’re pretty confident we’ll be able to get into orbit and then another spacecraft will come and pick up the test tubes and fly them back to Earth.

That is a scientific endeavor. But there’s also no doubt that that’s also a technological endeavor to see, can we go there and can we come back? Can we land people safely on there and then can those astronauts and then maybe civilians at some point, can they get back to Earth? As far as I’m concerned, I think that’s a huge part of the mission. But I love that idea, not necessarily as it relates to physical sacrifice, but the idea of this will outlive all of us. It has a real longevity to it that it’s like “Yeah, we’re doing this mission now and we, meaning the scientists and engineers, will probably not be alive to see it.” These are the planted seeds. They won’t see the harvest of whatever became of these tiny little, they seem huge, but in terms of longevity, are probably tiny little moments and space exploration or planetary exploration. Really, in that way, I think it is sacrifice.

It’s putting your marker on the stars, I guess, and going forward from there.

Right. I was at the Hamptons Film Festival a couple days ago, and I had an older gentleman come up to me in tears. I have a lot of older people that come up and normally everyone tells their moon landing story, which I always love to hear about. It feels so far away to me because I was born in ’81, but it was only 12 years before I was born. But anyway, he came up in tears and was saying, “I remember that moment. I wanted to be an astronaut and I didn’t. I became a lawyer, etc. I always, even as a little boy, wanted to see humans on Mars.” He is like, “I don’t think I’m going to see it in my lifetime,” and he was crying. And I was like, “You might.” He’s like, “I’m 70.” I was like, “Well, you might.”

‘Good Night Oppy’ is currently in select theaters and will debut on Amazon Prime Video on November 23.