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Aaron, how do you feel about the filming experience?
Eckhart: Primarily, I feel like we sweated and bled for this movie and, like every movie I do, I want people to see it because I think it's worth seeing. And I think Jon did a great job and all that. So I want it to be successful for that reason.
Why did you decide to make this film?
Eckhart: I wanted to do a movie that was fun for me to do, that I didn't have to kill myself or torture myself, that my parents could go see, the whole family could see. Kids could see this. There's very little swearing in this movie, if any. It's not laden with nudity and violence.
How did you prepare to play a scientist?
Eckhart: They just tell me things to say and I say them. But it was fun getting to know the science of it. It was fun. I bought a chalkboard, and I'd sit there and teach my friends about the core of the Earth and how it's spinning and the revolutions and the heat and the electromagnetic field and how it protects us from the sun's solar radiation, the solar wind. You don't know this. I do, damn it, because I studied.
So you felt that it was important to study the science?
Eckhart: When we were doing it I thought, let's get the information out there—because you have to—but let's do it in a fun way. Let's do it in kind of a truthful way. When I went to JPL and these guys were, like, in these dark garage closets with the Mars probe sitting on the floor, and I'm like, "That's the Mars probe, dude. You might want to put that up here." It was like they were talking about these parties or a weird thing this guy did and all this kind of stuff. And I go, "You guys are out of your minds." Nobody would believe it.
We're all smart. All of us are smart, and we all have funny things to say, and we all in our own circumstances and our own lives are witty and self-deprecating and arrogant at the same time, and that's where all the humor in life comes from. And I think a movie like this can get pretty wooden if we don't attempt at least to get some humor in it.
You do have a lot of comedic moments in the film. How much of that came from you personally?
Eckhart: We said in rehearsals of this film, we said, "Look, man, what kind of movie is this going to be?" None of us had done science-fiction movies, and we were all happy to work with each other, but we said, let's try to bring some humor and humanity to it. Those are the movies that work. That's why, for example, Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford in action movies, because there's this sly humor. ... So we wanted to go out and have fun. And also, it makes it interesting for us. When there's an energy flowing between the actors, and you want to say something. It's usually funny or tragic or whatever it is. And that's where the colors come from in the movie.
What was the most surprising thing about the experience?
Eckhart: That I had fun doing it. That I kind of got used to it. That it's fun running around. It's fun getting sweaty. ... That kind of stuff is actually fun because it brings me back to an age when I did that for real life. I had all the toys. I had the GI Joes, the Tonka trucks. ... I always want to run around and play war and stuff like that.
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