Julian Glander’s feature debut Boys Go To Jupiter is the happiest surprise of my moviegoing year—and it’s now available on Video On Demand! Sweet, surreal, and unexpectedly emotional, it tells the story of Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), a boy who becomes a little too hyperfocused on the idea that money will solve all of his problems, until aliens arrive and complicate his life in adorable ways. The movie showcases a really unique voice in a pretty bleak time, the voice cast is, frankly, absurd, and the movie is unabashedly FLORIDIAN.
Julian Glander is a Pittsburgh-based filmmaker who has also spent some time in Florida, and who refracted a lot of that state’s charm into his work. He’s created a lot of fabulous art and animation, some of which you can find on his website, including a four-part series “Jonathan Pillows” which includes a short called “Plant Funeral” that has also become one of my favorite things of the year—I’ve had the phrase “This guy killed Leify!” in my head for a month now, and I’m super happy about that.
I had a chance to talk to Julian over Zoom about the process of making the film, his animation touchstones, and a little bit of Floridian weirdness.
Leah Schnelbach: How did this become the idea that you wanted to develop into a feature and how long did the development take and draft of the script?
Julian Glander: The script took forever. Compared to how long it took to make the movie—I was in this loose, silly script mode for three years. In the pandemic I’d become really obsessed with delivery drivers, all these new rituals like contactless delivery—they were very interesting and very funny. The idea that you have someone set down the food, leave, yell at you they’re gone, and then you scuttle out and take the food. And they’ve taken a picture to prove that they did it. It’s so slapstick, almost. So, I knew I wanted to talk about delivery drivers—but that’s sort of all I knew. I started writing the story on an alien planet, and I thought it would be good to do “the gig economy… in space!” but then I kept coming back to specifically Floridalicious stuff, like I wanted them growing oranges on this planet, and it kind of came to me that Florida is actually weirder than any alien planet you could think of. I read this article about this company called Natalie’s Orange Juice. It’s a family-owned company, and there was a New York Times article about how the woman who started it was having a hard time passing the company on to her daughter—there were some growing pains there, and that tickled my Florida brain—but also the idea of some sort of chamber drama. Palace intrigue at an orange juice company! And that became the thing that the whole movie got written around.
Leah: I loved that aspect of Dr. Dolphin and Rosebud! I knew people who worked with people who worked with the Lillys, like, their academic grandchildren. How did that dolphin element come in?
Julian: That dolphin stuff comes up all the time—you’re at a party and the party’s winding down and somebody’s talking to you about this dolphin research. It’s become the stuff of urban legend. It was in the back of my mind: this idea that there’s a species that’s better than us is endlessly appealing, because in some ways it gets us off the hook, right? It’s not just our planet, the dolphins could have stepped in at any time, and they chose not to.
Leah: I really enjoyed the idea that the dolphins are their own alien consciousness.
Julian: They are! And they’re kind of weirder than anything you could ever imagine. You could never invent dolphins.
Leah: How many drafts did you go through? Did you sort of accrete, or rewrite each time?
Julian: I wasn’t printing them out—I feel like printing [drafts] out and putting the brads in makes it real—it was more like jamming together pieces for a long time. A lot of the rewriting happened in the month-long period when we were recording the voices. We recorded with Sarah Sherman, and based on the lines I got from her, I rewrote the scenes to fit the next character who was going to record, and it felt very on-the-fly, especially with such a great cast who came from so many different backgrounds of writing, improv, and directing. There was a lot of room for them to play around in the sessions. The most massive changes to the script happened in the recording studio.
Leah: And the recording was about a month overall?
Julian: It was less than a month! A lot of the people in the movie recorded for like an hour. We were really up against—we had no money, and the SAG strike was about to happen. I think we recorded with Joe Pera the DAY before the strike was going to happen at midnight. Like we have to get this done TODAY or there’s probably not going to be a movie. It was quick—I think it was April that we started emailing people, in June we recorded, and then I went away for the whole fall and winter to basically make the movie.
Leah: And you used Blender [a free, open-source 3D computer graphic software that’s been used in projects as varied as The Secret of Kells, The Man in The High Castle, and the Oscar-winning Flow]—I’m not an animator at all, just a writer, so how does the Blender process work?
Julian: It’s a great software. I think it’s having its moment this year, with Flow winning the Academy Award. I’ve been using it for twelve years now, so I remember when it kind of sucked, and I miss how janky it was? But a couple great things about Blender, just to quickly champion it, are that it’s free, and it’s open source. I wouldn’t have ever started using it if it was $10 even—but it was something you could try out, and I think because it’s free, and so many people have tried it, there’s a really big community; any problem that you’re having, there’s a Youtube video on it, there’s a forum post on it, there somebody who’s written a special script for it. I think every single day, every single scene of this movie—there’s something that an anonymous or semi-anonymous Blender user saved my day.
Leah: That’s fantastic! It’s not just a tool, it’s become a community.
Julian: I think it’s the thing—like this was sort of the promise of the internet, that we’d have tools that would empower people, and people would share ideas and resources with each other. It’s kind of sitting right there, and it’s truly amazing.
Leah: That’s an important point, because I think in the film you get at this… it’s not exactly “nostalgia”, it’s not exactly “retro”, but it’s like you’re taking little bits of the ‘80s and ‘90s and that sort of aesthetic, and you’re combining it with very immediate pandemic-era things, like you were saying. Did you have to work out a balance for that, or did you want to set in in a specific time, or make it more surreal and timeless?
Julian: It seems like the film industry has a really tough time placing things in time. No one wants to shoot a movie and by the time it comes out everyone’s using an iPhone that’s three years old, because movies are such a slow process. I feel like a lot of the things I watch are stuck in this sort of timeless place where cellphones kind of exist, social media kind of exists, but also everyone’s listening to postpunk or they have old radios and stuff. That’s something we were pushing against. Early on, the first draft had this character who was a radio announcer, like Sam Jackson in Do the Right Thing or like the radio announcer in The Warriors, who kind of guides you through the movie, and as I was developing it I was like “I don’t think these kids would listen to the radio, I think this has to be something else” and it became this financial influencer guy, Mr. Moolah, played by Demi Adejuyigbe.
Leah: I loved how you added in, I think it’s Larba who does the influencer vacation videos? I love the idea that the aliens are also doing YouTube videos.
Julian: I think one of the questions was, “What would the aliens think if they came to Earth, and the place they landed was the gas station?” And actually, it would be kind of amazing! If you could go to 7-11 with fresh eyes and see the rows of different chips and stuff, it would blow your mind.
Leah: OK, this might be too stupid a question, but why spaghetti? I was so pleased with it—trying to fit the spaghetti through the mail slot was so good. Was it easy to animate?
Julian: It was actually kind of hard to animate! I set myself up for a challenge with all those noodles. I think it’s more that it has a special place in animation history with Lady and the Tramp—maybe that’s what I was going for—another iconic spaghetti scene that I’m trying to connect the movie to.
Leah: It’s so goopy!
Julian: It’s a classic comedy food! It’s a long rope, it’s a pile of sludge, it’s wet!
Leah: I really enjoyed your take on our current internet weirdness. Here’s how another culture is processing this, they’re taking this really nice connecting idea of “Come with me on vacation and I’m going to tell you about my life!” and it’s a nice idea, when it’s done well.
Julian: It is a nice idea and it’s not really that far off from what we all get out of YouTube.
Leah: Originally you wanted it to be on an alien planet and then you brought it back to Florida. At that point—did you always want to bring in the sci-fi element? Or did you develop the aliens as you went?
Julian: I think that core thing of the movie was this idea of a delivery boy getting his hands on something that was more valuable than it appeared to be and having to make a choice whether he was going to sell that valuable thing, betray that valuable thing or do something that was more pure and special. And that’s the choice that he does end up making in the movie and the thing that he gets his hands on is this alien. Which, there’s so much going on in the movie that we could do the whole interview and not even talk about the aliens they’re not even the weirdest thing in the movie. And this is really true of life, the people on earth are weirder than any aliens you could ever think of
Leah: I really enjoyed the way that you used a sci-fi element that was a first contact story, but there isn’t any fear or othering, Billy just sort of accepts Donut and brings him home.
Julian: I think that’s how it would be though! We have this repeated narrative for the last five or six years in culture that the president is gonna release some big news about UFOs and actually nobody cares. People are so… they’ve taken in so much information In the last decade that it’s like theirs is nothing you could show me that would surprise me anymore. Those little grey guys would just be another day on the internet.
Leah: I don’t know if that’s good or sad.
Julian: It’s really bad I think! It’s so fatiguing. Our brains have been so worn down by this.
Leah: What would you say are your animation touchstones? What made go you into animation?
Julian: When I think back to the stuff I liked as a kid that still resonates, it’s classic Claymation, like Gumby, and then Frog and Toad, and the Rankin-Bass stuff—I like any animation where you can kinda see what [the animator is] doing. I really like the idea of honesty in animation. To me, there’s nothing better than a snowman being three circles. They took those three balls of Styrofoam and stacked them and there he is, it’s a snowman! That is the magic of animation. This is an extension of that, like digital Claymation.
Leah: You enter into the surreality of it, and after a second you get used to the animation style and it creates its own world. I feel like in a lot of animation there’s an attempt to make it “realistic” but with what you did the surrealism is sort of baked into it, and it becomes much more absorbing. What’s next, if you want to talk about it? Is there anything you’d like to plug?
Julian: We’ve released this Adult Swim project for their series Ambient Swim, it’s called “Cool Hooper”, and it’s 30 minutes of hula-hooping animation. It’s still new.
