Actor Bill Pullman Stages Theatrical Space Odyssey

Ask the average person what the connection is between Bill Pullman and space exploration and you're likely to hear references to the sci-fi movies he has starred in, such as "Spaceballs" or "Independence Day." But the actor and director has much more invested now in the recent history of space flight as his own creation, the theatrical production "Expedition 6," has opened for a month engagement at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Calif.

Pullman recently sat down with collectSPACE.com to discuss his play, the lessons it is meant to convey to its audience and the appreciation he has come to inherit through it.

collectSPACE (cS): What is "Expedition 6"?

Bill Pullman (BP): It's an odyssey story, that follows the journey of the three guys, two astronauts and [a] cosmonaut, who were on Expedition Six that were launched in November 2002 and were up there when the Columbia was in low Earth orbit and then lost on its return, and the consequences that affected their mission and challenged them to get home.

cS: How did you first learn of Columbia's loss?

BP: It was a Saturday morning, and I think I was in the car driving. I had to go run to get milk and I heard the radio report. I remember pulling off to the side of the road and listening to it.

It was stunning to me. I was aware that I hadn't kept up on it. I wasn't somebody who was aware that they had even gone up. Suddenly I became hugely interested, reading everything I could the next few days. Then to realize by Monday, I saw, because it was at the same time as the build-up to the Iraq war, that the news was pushed back to the back pages, in the LA Times anyway, and that's when I saw the sidebars about Expedition Six being on the space station and now that the shuttle was grounded, looking to figure out what was the best way to get them home and what will happen to the space station.

cS: How did you get the idea to translate the experiences of the Expedition Six crew into a theatrical production?

BP: I had clipped a lot of articles about it that were in the paper. Then I had gone up and talked to a friend who was interested in doing something up in Denver and I went up there to meet with these eight actors that were trained in low flying trapeze. The thought of what that story would look like in this type of very minimalist theater world, with trapeze and other things, interested me.

cS: Other than the clippings, what other sources did you use for reference?

BP: I used a lot of Space.com, NASA.gov for the text of the piece – interviews and things like that – that happened both when they were up there as it was waiting to be determined what the mission would be and from that point on, and then when they returned to Earth.

cS: How important was it to you to capture the history of Expedition Six factually?

BP: I didn't really set it up to be a historic document.

I was interested in using first person accounts and data that I gathered, but I took a lot of what I call "fudging" license, in order to fill out a story that I think needs to be a larger story than just reporting about that one incident, into being a story about travelers in space.

So I used a lot of other first person accounts from astronauts who were very articulate about all the different types of components of their experience and selected the ones that intrigued me most, and used that as the central narrative, but the backbone was [Expedition Six Science Officer] Don Pettit's space chronicles.

cS: Speaking of Pettit, we heard that you recently had a chance to finally meet him and his ISS commander Ken Bowersox. How did that go?

BP: I was nervous! (laughs) Oh my god, I think that's why I put it off for so many years.

I had done almost all the research in 2003 and I sent it to them, the script, before talking to them not knowing what they would think. They both came back embracing of it, and also very generously offered to help tweak the things that I had kind of slugged in there that I was looking to make more accurate. I had just kind of rough stuff about certain terminology that I had kind of danced around.

And then when I got with Don and Ken, and we went through the script together, it was great. They understood the whole thing of what I was doing. You know, there were certain things I have their wives saying that were said by other astronauts' wives, but the core of things, they could recognize their own words in their interviews, and what their wives had said at other times, so they understood I was making a theater piece. There's a black guy playing Don Pettit, so it's really not a historical thing at its essence. (laughs)

But it is historical in what I get out of knowing those two guys. Meeting them made me want to bring it in line with what I was feeling about them, which was two admirable characters, incredibly interesting [and] very different.

I also had to recognize that what theater wants is conflict, and what those three were able to achieve was in fact one of the most harmonious residencies of the space station that has been up there. Yet that wasn't good for my story! (laughs) So, I had to take some tensions that I could tell happened and extrapolate upon them.

What message does Pullman hope audiences take from "Expedition 6"? Does Pullman want to fly in space? What does he treasure from Expedition Six? Continue reading the interview with Bill Pullman at collectSPACE.com.

• VIDEO: Orbital Acrobatics Aboard Space Station
• As it Happened: ISS Expedition 6
• Complete Space Station Expedition Coverage