The American Astronaut - Production

Production

The entire film was shot on 35mm black & white negative film for an ambiguous budget of "between 1 and 2 million". The unusual use of paintings for special effects shots was mostly for budget reasons. However, the director felt that neither CGI nor miniatures looked convincing. Therefore, they decided to hand paint the special effects shots to create a look unique to the film. Many props and sets were donated or bought with thrift store materials and modified to fit the film's needs. The offline edit was done on an Avid system and the camera negatives were cut to match the video edit and followed a traditional optical post-production. The entire film has overtones of isolation and segregation especially between men and women and has a stark sense of avant-comedy in the vein of Guy Maddin or William Klein films.

"The American Astronaut" was workshopped in 1998 at the Sundance Writers’ Lab while still in screenplay form. Cory McAbee, the film’s writer, director, and star, who is also the front man for the rock and roll band, The Billy Nayer Show, began writing the script and composing songs for the film about a decade before. Although The Billy Nayer Show is a band, it was never intended to be devoted solely to the production of music. The group describes itself more like a "creative think tank that launches multiple projects in a diverse array of media." The band's multi-facted approach to "The American Astronaut" resulted in a film that featured numerous hand made elements as well as an emphasis on craft.

For "The American Astronaut," McAbee, Production Designer Goeff Tuttle, and artist Maria Schoenherr hand-painted every shot depicting the exterior of Curtis’ spaceship as it travels through outer space. As producer Josh Taylor explains, "We wanted to represent outer space in a way that no one had ever seen before". The look of outer space depicted in "The American Astronaut" was inspired by McAbee’s memories of his grandfather and father. An inventor, whiskey runner and freight train jumper, and a guy who could fix absolutely anything mechanical, McAbee’s grandfather was in many ways a holdover from the days when Northern California was still the Wild West. McAbee’s father, in turn, was an auto mechanic and cowboy from Booneville, California.

Many of "Astronaut’s" costumes were designed, discovered and often hand made by Dawn Weisberg. Curtis’ outfit, The Boy’s outfit, and Body Suit’s body suit all reflect the personal histories of the characters and are meant to evoke the lonely routine of outer space. But Weisberg also created whole communities based on wardrobe, from the first men we see in the saloon to the legion of laborers on Jupiter to the all-female society on Venus. "Dawn really understood Cory’s notion of groups of isolated men and women and how fashion would get translated under those circumstances," says producer Taylor.

W. Mott Hupfel III photographed "The American Astronaut." He worked closely with McAbee to achieve a black and white that could help audiences suspend disbelief about an outer space where there is no atmosphere to filter light, while still leaving a lot up to the imagination. "We wanted the audience to see much of what is happening in shadow," explains McAbee. The Boy’s performance on stage was lit and photographed to create a massive shadow, which in some shots takes up much of the screen. Mott also lit and photographed The Boy like a silent movie star in the scenes that he and Curtis share in the space ship. Says McAbee," Mott worked on putting a little bit more light on Greg than on me. It was like a special effect that explained everything about our characters — here was this dirty trader guy at the helm and next to him was this young hero. Mott understood what we were after and made the film look exactly right."

All of the music that appears in "The American Astronaut" was written and composed for the film by The Billy Nayer Show’s McAbee, Bobby Lurie (on drums and one of the film’s producers), James Beaudreau (guitar) and Michael Silverman (bass). But as with all of The Billy Nayer Show’s musical enterprises, McAbee worked to create a unique sound for the musical elements of "The American Astronaut"–elements to not only advance the film’s narrative, but to fit the characters’ motivations and moods. Says McAbee, "One of the things about the film that makes it unlike other musicals is that the music is organic — the people in the film aren’t just putting it out there for no reason. I wanted musical numbers to be fully integrated into the story. So one number happens at a dance contest, one at a rally of workers on Jupiter, and one number is even used as a kind of musical assault perpetrated against Curtis in a bathroom. Curtis uses song to make a grand entrance when he is in the open air of Venus, but even then he is serenading the ladies there to persuade them to do business. He is trying to charm them and soften them up."

"When we went to create the soundtrack," explained McAbee, "it was a more physical process than when we would record a new album. When I went in to talk with everyone about how I wanted a song to go, we would have to describe how the camera was moving, what the characters were doing, take into account choreography. Because of this, the ideas we had for the music going into the studio continued to develop, and the songs turned out greater than we ever anticipated."

Much of the film — from the interiors of Curtis’ spaceship to the grand auditorium where the workers on all-male Jupiter rally — was shot in an old ballroom in Maspeth, Queens. While providing a great "Art Deco gone wrong" space for such operatic moments as the song by the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast, the Maspeth location was a challenging place to shoot. Freezing cold, filthy with (noisy) nesting pigeons and located adjacent to a (noisier) major truck route, the production nonetheless had the run of their own soundstage for as long as they needed it, as well as an atmosphere that was as still and as cold and as dead as the face of the moon.

In the end, Music Director Bobby Lurie learned from making "The American Astronaut" that "People think that they can fix a film with music, as if music were a band-aid or something. It never works. But I also learned that you can take a good film and make it great with the right music. Our hope is that because we were able to listen to a lot of people’s ideas, and they were able to listen to ours, we’ve been able to come up with something really unique, really different, and really fun."