Adam's Odyssey

Johan Renck talks interstellar spiders and making Sandler a Spaceman

- JACK SHEPHERD

AFTER EVERY MAJOR PROJECT, JOHAN Renck, the director behind some of the best episodes of Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and Vikings, found himself wandering the streets of Brooklyn, telling himself “I’m never going to do this again.” In fact, after helming every episode in the Emmy-winning series Chernobyl, he planned on either opening a restaurant or becoming a gardener. But then he read the script for an adaptation of Spaceman Of Bohemia, a 2017 novel by Czech-born author Jaroslav Kalfař, and decided to park his alternate career plans.

“I read it and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit’, because it was so evident that I had to do this movie, it was very biographical for me,” he tells Red Alert. In the main character Jakub Procházka – an astronaut on a one-man mission to collect samples of dust from a mysterious purple cloud that has appeared near Jupiter – Renck saw a younger version of himself, back when he was willing to do anything to achieve his ambitions, even at the expense of his personal life.

“It felt like atonement to do a film in which I go into some aspects of my undoing,” he says. “A lot of people can relate to that. We’re all thrust into this idea of ambition and reaching the next level of progress. But these are not things that are part of the nature of our universe.”

SPIDERS FROM JUPITER