Interview: A 'Goodnight Oppy' trio

After making documentaries about Dr. Ruth, Serena Williams, and The Beatles’ longtime secretary, director Ryan White turns his camera on NASA for Goodnight Oppy, his most ambitious film yet.

In it, White chronicles the unexpectedly long life of Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover affectionately dubbed Oppy by her creators and scientists at NASA. Originally expected to live for a mere 90 days, she ultimately explored Mars for nearly 15 years.

The director recently sat down to discuss his latest film with Asheville Movies, which also received valuable insights from two NASA scientists featured in the film: Doug Ellison, Engineering Camera Payload Uplink Lead at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Alhambra, Calif., and Abigail Fraeman, a deputy project scientist at the Mars Science Laboratory at the JPL, the latter of whom witnessed Oppy land on Mars in 2004 while participating in a high school outreach program that brought her to her future workplace.

Doug Ellison (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Joel Winstead: NASA has always been good at documenting their missions. I’m sure there were always cameras around, and you’ve been on this project for a long time. What’s it like now, seeing the Opportunity splashed on theater marquees and sharing your story?

Doug Ellison: It’s not gotten old yet. Seeing our rover on billboards and movie posters and the banners above cinemas, it’s very strange, it’s very surreal. But also, it's really rewarding to see that story we were a part of being documented so beautifully. It feels like the right kind of closure for our project. It feels like this is the final telling of our story and now, emotionally, we can all put it to bed. It feels like the right way to go out.

JW: Seeing the data you captured, then getting it to ILM, and then seeing this Mars in a very lifelike situation, what’s that like,knowing that is the data you captured?

DE: That is very surreal. All the data that these rovers ever took, and even the orbiters that are mapping Mars as well, it all ends up online for anybody to use. But I sat down over Webex [video conferencing] with ILM for hours and hours saying, “This is the data. This is the best version of that data. Here’s how to process [it] into something you might be able to use. Here’s how to use the orbital imagery.”

And in the back of my mind, I kind of maybe had an idea of what they might be able to do with all those different pieces, and they knocked it out of the park. They did such a beautiful job of taking this data and making the Mars that all of us on the project were familiar with. Not the kind of Mars you might typically see with a Mars movie, which is normally Utah or the Jordan Desert or something with the sky painted out. It’s the Mars that we knew to love through the cameras of our rovers. It’s absolutely extraordinary. 

JW: It looks amazing. Having that team and Amblin on board kind of harkens back to childhood nostalgia, and seeing Oppy kind of join the ranks of R2-D2 or Johnny 5. Do you have any action figures of Oppy hanging around?

DE: I do! I have a small Opportunity rover on my desk at home. I think I also have an R2 as well. Believe it or not, someone who was training to be a rover driver at the end of the Opportunity mission actually built her own life-size R2-D2 as well, which she drives around and goes to cons with. So, yeah, being able to buy a little version of your…for want of a better phrase, your company car, is very, very strange.

Abigail Fraemen (Photo courtesy of NASA)

JW: When you were there in highschool, obviously there were cameras there. NASA does a great job documenting everything they do. And then years later, you're back on the same project. What is it like now, seeing the Opportunity splashed on theater marquees and on billboards and sharing your story?

Abigail Fraeman: It’s trippy. It’s weird to see it, and it’s certainly weird to see myself as a 16-year-old on an IMAX movie screen. But it’s so exciting, too, because all these different people from all these different places are able to see this film and learn about what the rovers did and hopefully be inspired by them. I love that.

JW: You were picked as part of a contest, and then in the in-between years of high school and when you got brought back on, were you constantly following it? Did you feel like you were a part of it in some way?

AF: Yeah, I actually kind of ducked in and out. My first research in undergrad, the summer after my freshman year, I worked for the lead for the cameras, Jim Bell, at Cornell University as a summer student. It was my first real planetary science research experience and I loved it. Then I went off to graduate school, and, in 2010, my advisor there was Ray Arvidson, who’s the deputy principal investigator for the rovers. So he brought me on board as one of the science team members.

I got to help with the tactical operations of Opportunity for a couple of years, help look at the orbital data to figure out where to drive Opportunity. I got a little distracted with curiosity for a couple years, but then when I started at [NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory], the project was looking for a deputy project scientist, so I was able to come back and be with the mission until the end. 

JW: It’s a great circle-of-life moment, and now working back on Mars again with Curiosity, has that experience with Opportunity helped inform what you’re doing now?

AF: Absolutely. I think Opportunity and Spirit showed us how to operate a rover on Mars. And the kind of way you do science, its very different than if you’re in the field as a geologist where you can run back and forth and look at everything. With the rover, it’s kind of like doing geology with horse blinders on, so we’ve gotten much better at being able to do that and know what data to collect and when to move on, or when to maximize the very limited time and resources we have on the planet. 

Ryan White (Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios)

JW: Were Amblin and ILM already on board when you came on?

Ryan White: Half and half. So, Amblin was on board and brought the project to me. They came to me with the idea to make the film and I said “yes” right away. The initial conversations I had with them, my vision as a director, was saying, “Is it possible to take the audience to Mars in a way they’ve never been taken before by using all the photography and data that we have and turning it into a photo-real Mars through visual effects?” Amblin said, “We have no idea, but you should get on the phone with Industrial Light and Magic.” And that was the beginning of that partnership and working with them for the next two years to create Mars. 

JW: So, working with two of the companies probably most at the forefront not only the childhood nostalgia of space, but bringing sci-fi dreams to life, Oppy felt like it was joining the pantheon of the great space droids like R2-D2. Was that your experience, wanting to kind of convey that, especially with Amblin behind you?

RW: Yeah! I think the biggest comparison for me even more than R2-D2 or Wall-E even was E.T. And not only because that’s part of Amblin’s legacy, but because I felt like this story arc was very similar and the tone was very similar. So, even when we were out pitching the film, we weren’t using other documentaries as the comparison; we were often using the tone of E.T. to tell people what we were going for. 

JW: Well, it is beautifully conveyed and masterfully written. That writing, having to have a timeline in between writing that screenplay and then getting it to ILM to make these space scenes — being a documentarian, have you done much script writing before or was it kind of new territory for you?

RW: this was totally new territory for me. I’ve never written a screenplay for any of my documentaries. The typical way you make a documentary, especially the kind that I make, is you go out into the world, you film a bunch of footage, and you come back to the editing room and you find your story in that dark space with your editors. This was very different. We wrote the story at the beginning, based on a ton of research and a ton of pre-interviews with people where we gathered the story.

Then we started the ball rolling with Industrial Light and Magic while we went out and shot our footage and while we watched all the archival that NASA was giving to us. But like any documentary, things always should change as you’re editing the story, and they did — just as I’m sure they do on any scripted film, that in the edit, things change from their original script. But it is pretty remarkable how similar the final film is to that original screenplay we wrote in 2020. 

(Photo courtesy of Prime Video)