Interview: Ryan White on "Good Night Oppy" and recording Angela Bassett

by Nathaniel R

Director Ryan White and his new film "Good Night Oppy"

In October I had the pleasure of introducing director Ryan White to a warmly receptive audience at the 10th annual Middleburg Film Festival. They'd just screened his buzzy documentary Good Night Oppy and there was lots of love in the room. That's been a through line with the film wherever it's shown. The space exploration documentary has since received glowing notices and several awards including five wins at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards. The charming doc about two sister robots on Mars, "Opportunity" and "Spirit", who wildly surpassed initial expectations, also represents a change of pace for the director. He's always had range. His previous lauded projects have included films as varied as the Oscar finalist short Coded (2021) about the gay golden age illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, the Emmy-nominated political doc The Case Against 8 (2014), the Emmy nominated unsolved crime doc-series The Keepers (2017), and profile docs like Ask Dr Ruth (2019) and Serena (2016). 

When we first met Good Night Oppy had not yet reached Amazon Prime but it was headed there for the Thanksgiving holiday. A feast it would likely be to families that gave it a try. I was delighted to catch up with White to talk about the film again now that it's available to a wide audience...

NATHANIEL: Ryan let's start with the awards thing. Are you enjoying campaign season? 

RYAN WHITE: I've done the Oscar thing a couple times. This year has been really fun because some of my best friends are on the same circuit with me. So, like Margaret Brown (Descendant) and Matt Heineman (Retrograde) and Andy. These are all good friends of mine so hitting the same spots with the same people has been really fun. Awards aside, the fun part is showing the film to audiences.

Recently -- it wasn't an award screening -- we did an educational screening in San Francisco. I walked into the theater for the final minutes of the film for the Q&A. We looked at each other and we were like, oh my God, this must be a terrible screening. Everyone is talking. The theater was so loud. And then this really bright shot of the movie came on, and we looked at the audience and it was 25 fourth-graders and they were standing up and screaming at the screen. It was incredible. They cheered for the final five minutes of the film, which would normally be a nightmare for a filmmaker because you couldn't hear the dialogue. But it was so sweet. Screenings like that have been really fun.

It's a very family friendly movie, which is a little bit unusual for a documentary!

RYAN WHITE:  We weren't making a kids movie but the best family films don't dumb it down for kids, anyway. I loved space films growing up. ET and Flight of the Navigator were two of my favorite films in the 1980s. And  I wanted to make something that I could have watched when I was growing up. It is totally rare as a documentary filmmaker that you can make something family friendly. My nieces and nephews can't -- I don't think they can watch anything that I've made. 

It was always the goal to make something that families could watch together. 

I wanted to ask about the cyclical nature of public interest in space exploration. People don't care about it for awhile and then it's suddenly a thing again that everyone is talking about!

RYAN WHITE:  I think NASA's whole lifespan has been very cyclical in the way you're saying. This tweet went viral in 2018 or 2019 when Opportunity sent her last communication to Earth, which was, 'my battery is low and it's getting dark'. I think it was like this global gut punch to people. It was very WALL•E esque, like this robot's in trouble on this planet and it's all alone. 

I think that's sort of the genius of this mission. It wasn't by accident that they designed this creature that people could fall in love with. And I think that's because they wanted us, the taxpayers who pay for these missions, to come along for the journey. I'm hoping that's what the film does as well, that it invites people along for the adventure.

I asked you this at Middelburg but we have to talk about it again. One of the things that struck me about the movie was that, because it takes place over such a long span of time, it felt like Boyhood, you're watching the engineers and scientists and everyone onscreen age. One of characters is a teenage student when you first see her and later she's an adult at NASA!

RYAN WHITE:  I forgot that you made the Boyhood comment! We were incredibly lucky that NASA are incredible documentarians themselves. Just as they created Opportuniy by design, they are also very conscious that documenting these mission is important for storytelling. It's amazing because they don't do it themselves. They hand this over to independent filmmakers like Todd Douglas Miller who made Apollo 11 an incredible film. But they document the hell out of these missions. There was one DP, his name's John Beck Kaufman, who shot most of Opportunity and Spirit's missions. We inherited that footage which was almost a thousand hours. So, yeah, you really do see people grow up in front of the camera; Kids become adults and there are plenty of people in my film who have passed away. 

I'd never made an archival documentary before. The fun of making this film was the discovery process. You have to watch every one of those thousand hours. It was like looking for needles in a haystack. And whenever we would find them, it was just such a rewarding moment.

IT'S ALIVE!

This is probably going to sound strange but I want to talk about "Casting". You're watching all this footage but you still have to select who to focus on. How with all that footage? 

RYAN WHITE: One of the most difficult challenges in this film! How do you pick only a handful of people when it's thousands of people who worked on this robot? What we did in the summer of 2020, because we couldn't meet with these people during the pandemic, is that Jess, my producing partner, did four dozen pre-interviews with people that played an important role in the mission. We used those pre-interviews to write a screenplay and that's also how we chose the people to be in the film. There was no exact methodology but obviously we were very conscious of people who played a critical role in the mission.

We were also very conscious that we were making this film with a large audience in mind and knowing kids would be watching. I did a press junket with Indian Press the other day and they were so excited that an Indian woman was in the film. It's not just Americans that work on these missions, it's people from all over the world. And we wanted kids to see their faces represented. So it was a lot about picking people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, all geographies, all generations.

Obviously they had to be great storytellers [as interviewees]. But that was a big surprise in making this film. I thought scientists and engineers would be very unemotional and not the best of storytellers. But it was an embarrassment of riches. Another great film with a completely different set of 11 people could be made.  

Funny that you say that. I assumed a lot of scientists would be like, I don't know, accountants. Monotone and dull when discussing the job.

RYAN WHITE: [That assumption] -- it's a challenge our film has. No matter how much people talk about how emotional Good Night Oppy is, so many people who come to screenings are still saying 'Oh, I thought this was going to be really dry and scientific' I think you just have to get people in the room to prove that theory wrong.

There's a great moment in the movie that involves an ABBA song. The music is in the archival footage but that must have still been a challenge -- you have to pay even if a camera was just recording a moment where someone was playing music. 

RYAN WHITE:  Yeah you don't have "fair use" music. We had to pay for all those songs and we were on a documentary budget! We have seven songs in the film. Jess and I made a Beatles film in 2013 where we actually got permission to use four Beatles songs. It took two years to line up those permissions so I know how hard that is. And we have, "Here Comes the Sun" in Good Night Oppy. We were told that the second hardest band to license after the Beatles is ABBA.

We thought it was gonna be a huge uphill battle. But I have to say, I think that's the magic of the logline of this film. It was going to be impossible to line up these songs with the small budget, but we were able to go to these record labels and say like, 'hear us out, we are not using your song as soundtrack. Your song was used to wake up a robot on another planet!'  or 'your song was used when a robot was dying and it meant so much to these people' I think it was different enough that it made people listen. 

Before we say goodbye, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about Angela Bassett who provides the narration. She's reading logs from the actual mission. Her voice is obviously very richly dramatic. That must have been a dream. 

RYAN WHITE:  The recording sessions with her were some of the best few days of my working life. She was always the voice I had in my head. This little gay boy growing up in Georgia saw What's Love Got To Do With It  three or four times in the movie theater. I love her. As with the record labels, it was one of those things where I was like, 'surely she will say no!'  We got a yes right away and recording with her was incredible.

Angela Bassett in "What's Love Got To Do With It"

As with the record labels, it was one of those things where I was like, 'surely she will say no!'  We got a yes right away and recording with her was incredible. I don't call it narration what Angela's doing. I say she's playing the voice of NASA because she's actually reading the daily diaries that someone from NASA wrote each night. I didn't write those words. Our Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini from Dune... he's a genius in the way he thinks about these things. He said 'we should record Angela differently than everyone else in the film. We put mics all around Angela  even behind her, in the booth. She was surrounded. So if you see Good Night Oppy in the theater, her voice is coming from everywhere. 

That was the idea, that she's the subconscious of this film. Her voice is obviously so wise and maternal and empathetic, which was important to me. I will never forget her recording that final line, which is, "Good night Opportunity, well done" as our camera tilts up into the stars. She had tears in her eyes as she was reading it. Then she looked back and she was like, 'do you want any more takes?' No, no, that's the one!

Good Night Oppy is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. 
Related: List of Oscar-eligible Documentary Features | Current Oscar predictions

Comments

[Peggy Sue]

Oh, I saw it on Monday! Very entertaining, moving even. I'm not a space person but I really liked this one and the Linklater.

P.S. Time to update the hot director's list.

[Ryan T.]

I just saw this yesterday so this interview is VERY timely for me. And great job on those questions, Nat. You pretty much asked ALL of the questions I had when I was watching -- how they "cast" the interviews, those song rights, and, of course, the Angela Bassett of it all.

Anyways, it was very cute (plus informative!) and I definitely teared up a few times.