Moving Forward Through an Emotional Story: A Conversation with ‘Spaceman’ Screenwriter Colby Day

Six months into a solitary research mission to the edge of the solar system, an astronaut, Jakub (Adam Sandler), realizes that the marriage he left behind might not be waiting for him when he returns to Earth. Desperate to fix things with his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), he is helped by a mysterious creature from the beginning of time he finds hiding in the bowels of his ship. Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano) works with Jakub to make sense of what went wrong before it is too late. Directed by Johan Renck and based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia, the film also stars Kunal Nayyar, Lena Olin, and Isabella Rossellini.

When you’re in complete isolation and with time on your hands, what do you do? Think. And then overthink. Rinse and repeat. And then your mind becomes overflooded with distant memories, some worth remembering and some you wish you could just push further and further out. And how do you come out on the other side? It seems like a black void to explore, but it’s a black void that is done quite well in Colby Day’s adaptation and latest film, Spaceman. For those hoping for a space Opera with Adam Sandler – pump the brakes. It’s a quiet film, filled with a lot of vulnerability and emotion, and oh, there’s a space spider.

Screenwriter Colby Day recently spoke with Script about how the book emotionally resonated with him to the adaptation process, exploring character development, collaborating with director Johan Renck and Adam Sandler, his writing journey and offers advice for budding scribes.

 This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie: Yeah, I love it works. It definitely works. Cool. So I will try to keep this short and sweet. I'm just starting from the top, I just love to hear about your attachment to this project, how this book came across your way and just that adaptation process for you. Yeah.

Colby Day: I had met Michael Parets who was our first producer on the film a couple years prior, because he had read a script of mine. And I think I told him when we met, ‘Whatever you have that's the most strange and interesting, and probably the hardest thing that comes across your desk is the thing I'll be interested in doing.' [laughs] And a friend of his had sent him the book Spaceman of Bohemia as a good read, ‘…not something I'm sending you to adapt into a movie, I'm just sending you a good book.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, but what if it was a movie?’ So, he sent it to me, and I just loved it. I think it's a really beautiful novel.

And I think when you're talking about film adaptations, you often get some things that are kind of an interesting idea, but not actually like a high piece of literary fiction. And so, I was really excited to have something that did a lot for me emotionally. And I sort of just felt like, 'Oh, if I can make a movie that gives people even some of the emotional things that the book did for me, this will have been worth it.' It was really a fun challenge to get to be thinking about how to adapt something that I already thought was really beautiful and meaningful.

Sadie: As a writer approaching this material, how do you translate what you felt from the initial read to the page and then obviously, making sure that resonates with whoever ends up directing and being able to visually translate that?

Colby: There's something about genre stories and space stories and Cosmos stories that really immediately get to the heart of, ‘What does it mean to be a tiny little human within the scope of history and the world?’ And the book has more background around what it means to be Czech and what it means to be not East or West. And what a strange coincidence that history would shake out this way.

And I think there was something that felt so meaningful to me about kind of the idea that Hanus has about the universe is as it should be, being both really true and meaningful and kind of like an incredible thing to realize. And also, something that felt like there's no way that that's true. And I don't believe it, and I think you're wrong. And I think that that dichotomy was really what connected most to me was sort of the idea of, ‘Is acceptance even good or bad? What is the point of coming to acceptance? And does it help you or not?’ It just felt so rich and complicated and emotional as a story to tackle.

Sadie: Yeah, and then finding your place in the universe as Hanus puts it, “the skinny human”, you start realizing, “No, I'm not that important as I think I am.’

Colby: Exactly, yeah.

Sadie: Which is so interesting to explore in this silence and isolation. Which reminds me of one of the great lines from the film stated by Commissioner Tuma, ‘When you're alone, you think.’ Universally, a lot of people can relate to that. Writers, especially. In terms of just diving into the world-building based off of this silence and isolation and compounding that with character development, how did you approach that? As an outsider, you’d think, there's no way you can get character development out of this thing. But you do in a very surreal and vulnerable way.

Colby: It is a really challenging piece of adaptation in that the book is sort of all in memory play. And so, as you kind of start to as a screenwriter try to map out, ‘OK, I do have a character who's growing and changing, but it's through the process of looking at things that have already happened and things that he no longer can influence. How do you at all make that feel propulsive?’ And not even in an action movie sense. But we are moving forward through an emotional story - I think was the hardest part of how do you even just come up with a structure for what the movie is?

I was at the very beginning of COVID lockdowns, on my living room floor covered in note cards [laughs] for this movie, trying to figure out when and why would each memory even happen. I think the fact that it's backwards looking gives you a ton of freedom, but it also means that you are given the bad part of freedom, which is you could kind of make any choice you want. And so, I think it was really my main struggle was how do you create a dynamic and I think Hanus kind of becomes the key for how you do that if the active part of the story is, ‘I'm in conversation with something that wants to get information out of me and I don't want to deal with it.’ It is the challenge of I think of all book adaptations in some sense of how do you take interiority and make it physical? But then I think particularly this book that so spans basically Jakub’s life through memory, it's a daunting task, for sure.

Sadie: Absolutely. And as you said, there's so much that you can do and there's so many options and choices, but you’re skirting the lines of reality and not reality and tapping into that element of showing us memories that Jakub wasn’t even there for – there is some kind of charm and fun to be had there, especially within this genre.

Colby: Yeah, I was always very intrigued by what it meant that Hanus could see into Jakub’s mind. I played with [it] in earlier drafts a lot of different versions of how can he physicalize them or see them or be the guide through the memories and I'm really excited with what we landed with as far as him being able to kind of be a passenger along with Jakub as we go back to things. And even things that Jakub may or may not have actually seen. But if you think about something enough, it's still in your mind. So yeah, I think the genre element of how do you go to these memories was really exciting.

Sadie: Were you part of that process in finding the director or were you more hands-off?

Colby: I had turned in the script and then Johan [Renck] read it and was excited about it. He and I met at, because he is based in New York, so he came out to LA and we met at the Chateau Marmont, and I drove up in my Prius, and they were like, ‘Who are you here to pick up?’ I was like, ‘No, I'm having a meeting.’ [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] I've had the same experience.

Colby: [laughs] They're like, ‘No, no, no, get out of here.’ I'm like, ‘No, I belong. I belong.’ [laughs] So we met really early on. As a writer, you're kind of navigating, ‘OK, there's the book. And then there's my conception of the movie. And then there's the director's conception of the movie.’ And Johan, I think wisely, had a lot of things he wanted to work on and focus on and reshift the movie to do, but wanted to wait until we knew who our lead actor was.

And then once we knew that it would be Adam [Sandler], Johan and I met again for maybe a week or two in New York and I dug in to, ‘OK, but how does this movie work? If we know that it's Adam doing this, what do we need to change?’ And Johan, I think was very interested in really focusing on Jakub and Lenka's relationship. And I think the book has a much broader scope of Jakub and Lenka - they’re part of it, but they're kind of a symptom of a much bigger thing going on for Jakub which is just the weight of history in the past and legacy. And so, I worked with Johan to really kind of winnow the movie down into its most distilled form of, ‘We're gonna tell this story.’ I visited set but it was still early COVID lockdown days, so it was very 'Hi. Goodbye.' [laughs]

Sadie: This is the perfect movie to make during COVID lockdown, because of that isolation.

Colby: Yes. Adam got to be alone on a spaceship for a long time.

Sadie: Once Adam came on board, did you go back to the script to retool it to his voice or his own take on this character?

Colby: Yeah, I think that when Adam first said he wanted to do it - I don't know that Adam was on our list of who should play this Czech astronaut. And once he raised his hand, Johan and I got really excited, because Sandler just has that thing in his face, where you immediately are really empathetic towards this guy, and he doesn't have to really do anything at all for you to just sort of feel like you're on his side.

And then Adam immediately was thinking really deeply about what does it mean if I have been isolated for this long? How does it impact me as a person? What does it mean if I suddenly have company again? And I think, he was doing a ton of homework as far as his approach to how he would even try to do the character. And this was like, immediately upon reading it, he was deep into questions and ideas.

I think it was really helpful to have an actor like that, who clearly cares so much, and also have someone who I've seen everything he's ever done, so to then sit and rewrite it, ‘Oh, I know exactly what we can try to get Adam to do.’ Just felt like an added bonus of things to explore.

Sadie: Was there a thematic North Star as you were writing this and making sure you followed it and didn’t waver away from it?

Colby: Wow, that's such a good question. I feel like what I was most excited to try to get to do was to tell a story where the ending also felt like a new beginning. And tell a story in which kind of the cosmic scale of it was the thing that brought someone to totally change everything. But also, that means everything previously is destroyed. And so, I think that my goal with the whole adaptation was always how do we get the final moment to feel both really sad, but hopeful? And I think it hits this sort of melancholic, closing of a chapter, but also opening of a chapter. And I think that that was a big hard undertaking, but I think the movie succeeded that, which was the goal.

Sadie: And that last line of the movie, which I’m sure I’m going to jumble, but he asks, “Will you kiss me again?” Getting to the emotional simplicity of that – the closure and the sense of hope – how do write that? [laughs]

Colby: And it's also something that is not on the page, not nearly as good. [laughs] That's one of those movie star things that Carey [Mulligan] and Adam can do that I think if we didn't have incredible people, it might not work as well. But yeah, they just knock the ending out of the park. It's beautiful.

Sadie: It really is. What inspired you to become a writer?

Colby: I grew up at the movies, basically....We were not a religious family, but we went to the movies every week. So, in a weird way, I feel like going to the movie theater was church. And I remember at a young age seeing, there was a Discovery Channel show about special effects. And I think every episode was probably about the Terminator. [laughs] But there is something about seeing people make the thing that I had never really thought about anybody making before that just sort of opened to me, 'Oh, I could be one of the people who makes the things somehow.' And that sort of timed out with my dad taking home a VHS camera from work, and us immediately being like, ‘Great, this is ours forever now,’ my brother and I - we made very, very bad little VHS movies that were just The X-Files ripped off or Spider-Man ripped off at home. And you do that for 20 years, and maybe you get better at it. [laughs]

I went to college in New York and kind of fell into writing theater, which was never where I thought I would end up but I think getting to write a lot of plays, sort of lets you figure out your artistic voice and what you're interested in. And also, how to navigate working with other people and directors and actors and designers and an audience like immediately, in a way that I think if I had come straight to LA and just tried to make movies, I don't know that I would have been able to do it.

So, I feel really lucky that I got to make a lot of weird theater in basements for a long time and figure out how to make a story interesting. Especially a story that you have no resources to put into it. It just has to be interesting. And did that for a long time before moving out to LA and I feel so grateful that I got to make a lot of weird theater first, because I think that became grad school, which was the best way to do it.

Sadie: Are there certain stories or themes that you're really interested in exploring?

Colby: I think everything I've written tends to talk about time in some way - I like a story that spans a lot of time, I like a story that talks about loneliness and alienation and what it means to connect and disconnect as a human. And I think everything I've ever done also has some sort of strange magic or magical realism, or a weird little alien guy. The movies to me are all about bringing you to another world, and then getting to come back home and carry that world with you. So, I always want to see stuff that feels a little crazy and has something wacky going on also.

Sadie: Any advice for budding writers?

Colby: The thing that I've always found most useful is to try to write exactly the thing I want to see. And that does not always equate to what seems popular or commercial, or like the best use of your time, honestly. But I think that writing exactly the thing you want to see is what lets you actually figure out who you are as a writer. And it also lets you show to other people exactly what you're capable of. And so, I think doing something that's unique, is just so much more valuable than trying to follow what you think someone else will want. It can mean there's a harder longer journey ahead for the project or for you as a writer, but I think it's just a more valuable way to do it. I personally feel like life is too short to spend your time on stuff that you aren't super passionate about. So, I try to remind myself the lesson of it's really hard to make anything, so you should care a lot about the thing you're making.

Spaceman is now streaming on Netflix.