“God, it’s nice to have a Brit on the set, someone who gets the fucking joke.” Director Peter Chelsom is jokingly referring to the one and only Gary Oldman. The joke-sharing Limey, one of the stars in Chelsom's latest The Space Between Us, is in action in this exclusive new look at the movie.
Chelsom’s first film since 2014’s Hector And The Search For Happiness focuses on Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield), an inquisitive, highly-intelligent teenager born on Mars to his astronaut mother. But when she dies during childbirth, her baby is left too weak to return to Earth, spending the subsequent years imagining life on our blue and green planet and pondering the identity of his unknown father. So, in an attempt to connect to his home planet (somewhere he will soon get to return to), Gardner strikes up an online friendship with Britt Robertson’s Tulsa. Just, you know, one that has them 34 million miles apart. Oldman plays NASA director Nathaniel Shepherd, the man responsible for the film's core Mars programme.
It may spend a lot of time on a distant planet, but Chelsom is keen to stress the intimacy of his film. “It’s about isolation and connection, amplified by the vastness of space,” he tells Empire. “It’s heavy action and sci-fi and at times it feels like a sweet, low-budget romance. It’s the balance between that massive scope and that good, strong heart.”
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The Space Between Us reaches cinemas on 10 February.