Spaceman Director Reveals The Unusual Adam Sandler Movie That Inspired His Casting - Exclusive

Without question, comedy great Adam Sandler has proven over the years that he can easily take detours down dramatic roads in films like "Reign Over Me" and "Uncut Gems," as well as turns on the dramedy route in "Funny People" and "Hustle." As impressive as Sandler was in those films, though, it was his complex turn in a 2002 romantic comedy-laced drama that captured the attention of director Johan Renck, and led to him being cast in the latter's new sci-fi drama "Spaceman."

Renck, whose directing credits include episodes of "Breaking Bad" and "Chernobyl," told Looper in an exclusive interview that he cast Sandler in "Spaceman" for two reasons. The first related to Renck's personal wish-fulfillment as it related to Sandler's character in the film, while the second emerged from the actor's performance in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's idiosyncratic gem "Punch-Drunk Love."

"This film ['Spaceman'] is very self-biographical, it's very much about my own experience, and if anybody would ask me, 'If somebody's going to play you in a movie, who's it going to be?' It's going to be Adam Sandler because I'm a massive fan of his," Renck told Looper. "So it was that, and the other aspect was actually 'Punch-Drunk Love.'"

In "Punch-Drunk Love," Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan, a lonesome entrepreneur who suffers from bouts of social anxiety. In "Spaceman," the actor suits up as famed Czech cosmonaut Jakub Procházka, whose loneliness coupled with his personal demons takes a heavy toll on his psyche.

"It was [about] this kind of awkwardness, this awkward guy trying to function, trying to make himself understood without really being able to do that in the face of the world, and so on and so forth," Johan Renck explained. "So, to me, it's his character from 'Punch-Drunk Love' [20] years later — that version of it to some extent."

While Renck entered the production of "Spaceman" knowing that Sandler had the wherewithal to bring Jakub to life, the director admitted that the actor brought some subtle attributes to the character that shocked him with delight."I got to say that I knew he's a great actor and all that, but the nuances of his eyes — this is very detailed now — is something that I just found myself putting the camera closer and closer to him because I wanted those subtle, the nuances of the reaction aspects of his eyes," Renck told Looper. "I couldn't stop watching that, and I said to him, "How the f*** do you even do that?" and he said, 'I don't know, man. I just do my stuff.'"

Whatever Sandler's stuff was, Renck said he couldn't get enough of it. "I was so compelled by it. I could not stop watching that and looking out for the subtleties in somebody like that," the filmmaker recalled. "I've never seen anything like it. And he is incredible. He really is."

While Adam Sandler communicates subtleties through Jakub's eyes in "Spaceman," his co-star Paul Dano only had his voice to rely on during the production. Dano voices Hanuš in the film, a giant alien spider that Jakub encounters as his mission to gather particles from a space cloud in the depths of the cosmos enters a crucial phase. As Jakub struggles with the torment of his past and a crumbling marriage to Lenka (Carey Mulligan) in the present, Hanuš calmly urges the cosmonaut to confront his troubles if he is to survive the mission.

For Johan Renck, getting the right voice for Hanuš to communicate with Jakub was crucial, and he knew going in that Dano had the skills to give the arachnid character the vocal resonance he needed. "I wanted a lot of Paul Dano in it, his kind of sort of cadence, apprehensiveness ... almost sort of shyness in there," Renck explained. "We treated the voice [that way] a little bit because he's not human, he's a spider creature. So, there was a little bit of a treatment going on in some of the frequencies of the register to just give it slightly more an airy feel to it. But like always, it's always a collaboration between me as a director and our actor in terms of what it is. But ultimately, I have to be happy with it because if I'm not happy with it, I don't know what I'm doing."

"Spaceman" begins streaming exclusively on Netflix on March 1.