The year 1976 is back with a vengeance. This is about The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was the iconic film starring David Bowie. Now, 46 years later, it has been re-imagined as a television series. Attendees at SXSW in Austin got a first look at it, with a special screening of the opening episodes.
Creator of the show Alex Kurtzman, the screenwriter most famous for his work on Star Trek movies and TV shows, was there! He was accompanied by three members of the cast and producer-writer Jenny Lumet, who sat for a discussion after the first two episodes were shown in the SXSW film theatre at the Convention Center.
Kurtzman was quite emotional as he spoke of being in a theatre with people again after a 2-year Covid absence. “Really what we do is for you. To get to hear laughter and emotion and catharsis as a community, especially at a time when the world is so divided, is everything. It’s the thing that will hopefully save us. So, it’s amazing for us to be here because we haven’t seen this on a big screen yet. I’ve never been more grateful to have a screening somewhere.”
Lumet picked up on this in her discussion about the theme of loneliness. “We always thought we were writing a show about the three loneliest people who ever lived on many planets and the journey they had to take to get back to themselves and to find each other. That this piece of material happened to also address urgent, topical, issues was an added blessing. We thought we were writing about something very, very human.”
Kurtzman described the original 1963 novel by Walter Tevis and the 1976 movie as “timeless. The film and novel are very different. What Tevis did was ask questions that every generation ask over and over. It just happens to be our generation feels like it’s a particular inflection point. When we started writing this it was early 2018, so it was before Covid. We had 4 or 5 scripts by the time the pandemic started, then we stopped which gave us the opportunity to go deep and think deeply about what’s going on in the world around us at a particularly crazy time. We didn’t know if stepping out of our houses meant were going to be dead, and that was quite a place to be writing from.”
More broadly, Kurtzman opined about the legacy Tevis left us. “We were all trying to make sense of what was happening: the purpose of art and story telling is to do that. Tevis certainly set that for us. I feel like we inherited this incredible source material but it was our responsibility to ask the same questions but to provide different answers given where we are now.”
The pandemic affected all the actors as well. Bill Nighy said he was locked down in Rome for 10 days. “I spent the whole time shouting a lot to the point where my neighbours phoned reception and I had to send them a bottle of prosecco because they thought I was screaming at my wife!” Nighy was being inordinately modest about his acting ability when he stated “Because I am uneasy about being an actor generally speaking it’s not hard to undermine me as I’m really good at it myself. One thing I can do something about is the lines and I kind of like learning lines and find a unique way of saying them.” My impression of his appearance at the end of the first episode was that he gave an outstanding performance, terrifying in its force and pathos. A very fine actor indeed, no matter what he says!
Nye met Bowie on several occasions and remarked on the effect Bowie’s death had on him. “I was an enormous enthusiast for everything that David Bowie did. When he passed, you don’t really know how much people mean to you until they pass. It was a very, very great shock. I wanted to honour him and his performance as much as I could.”
The New Mexico shots in the show were actually filmed in Spain, with much of the production made in England. “This is the thing I’ve done that feels most rounded,” admitted Kurtzman. “In my experience as a director and a writer I feel like somehow the time that Jenny and I had to really think through everything, I knew where we were going. I was able to plot every detail visually.”
Kurtzman attributes the on-screen look of the show to its cinematographer, Tommy Maddox-Upshaw. He gave this remarkable behind-the-scenes insight into how it all works. “We sort of shared a soul. One of things that I think you need from a cinematographer is that you’re sharing eyes. You have to have the same visual references, the same movies that you love, and why you understand why you’re choosing a particular lens to convey emotion because the only thing that matters is what does the shot make me feel? You need a cinematographer who understands in their DNA what that means.”
Even though this production of The Man Who Fell to Earth is the next level of science fiction, Kurtzman “approached this like a family drama, which was for me a real delight. I feel like that’s the director I always wanted to be.”
The series premieres April 24, 2022 on Showtime.
Group photo (l to r): Jimmi Simpson, Naomie Harris, Bill Nighy, Jenny Lumet, Kurtzman
Photos by C. Cunningham, copyright SunNewsAustin
