"Jon Amiel really wants the audience to care about the people," observes Delroy Lindo. "He has a very well-placed concern that the special effects in the film not override the human beings in the story.
Keeping the action tense and exciting, while at the same time exploring the dynamics of the crew inside the ship, is definitely of primary importance to Amiel.
"Character conflict is the stuff of all good drama," says the director. "You take this unlikely group of people -- a characteristically shabby geophysics professor. a career NASA commander, a take-charge astronaut, a very attractive, dynamic woman who is the youngest female ever to go into space, a French nuclear physicist, an arrogant scientist and his colleague with whom he’s had a 20-year rivalry --and you have an absolutely perfect recipe for a wonderful, rich character brew."
Alfre Woodard describes the six-person crew as being like "all the different parts of your brain" and Stanley Tucci agrees, adding that all six people "become like one person in order to save mankind."
Turkish born Tcheky Karyo, who plays the Frenchman, Dr. Leveque, points also to the multiracial element inherent both in the ship’s assembly team and its ethnically diverse terranauts. "There are cultural differences," lie says, "but human beings are human beings all the same. And you need all these different people to save the world."
"The most enjoyable part of the film is how people of very disparate natures overcome tremendous obstacles," says Tucci. "They have to call on different parts of themselves that maybe they’ve never called upon before."
"This film has everything," observes Eckhart. "It has humor, a little bit of romance and a lot of heroism. And it definitely covers new ground."
Director Jon Amid believes that audiences will have as much fun watching it as everyone had filming it. "No matter what, it’s an exhilarating ride that’s going to take people into a world they’ve never seen before."
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