Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Everyday Magic:
An Interview with Julian Glander on Boys Go to Jupiter
By Kyle Turner

All the theory in the world cannot change anyone’s immediate circumstances. Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett) knows this; he might have a big brain and a keen understanding of worker exploitation, but he still has to hustle a food delivery job in his small Florida town to get by at the end of the day. And the age-old fantasies of small-town escape are same as they ever were, yet lately they feel so much more desperate, with charlatan influencers proselytizing on the positive effects of money “vibrations” and the American Dream only an ostensible tap away. Meanwhile an orange juice empire, run by a steadfast businesswoman (Janeane Garofalo) who appears only via television screen and whose heiress (Mya Folick) is a slightly self-indulgent, half-read Marxist sloganeering teen with no intentions of taking over the family business, looks for a way to revitalize their brand during a slump in sales, their new invention perhaps a key to ancient and otherworldly secrets that have no place on the market. Billy hopes to establish steady ground on which he can start his own life out of his sister’s apartment, while his ragtag friends slack at the beach, just as his world collides with that of the aliens newly under his care. The fantasy isn’t even escape anymore, it’s just stability.

Julian Glander’s tremendously beautiful new animated film Boys Go to Jupiter takes on the PLAYMOBIL sheen and the nouveau-matte promises of childhood imagination to brilliantly paradoxical effect, recasting the disillusionment of late capitalist reality in the texture of childlike awe. Its soft corners and glimmering surfaces and broad, blocky synthetic shapes combine artificiality with a reverential eye for the tactile toy objects it recalls. Glander catches the rhythms of Floridian banalities, listening in on conversations that circle around one’s value being related to optimization, on one hand, or a kind of humanist apathy, on the other. The film finds a similar register as the television series King of the Hill, a panorama of compassionate folly and attempted destiny control set in stark relief against Goliath-like invisible machinations.

Boys Go to Jupiter mixes a prosaic but throbbing yearning reminiscent of Céline Sciamma and John Hughes; the weirdo swampy paradoxes of Harmony Korine and Sean Baker; the sobering “fuck this timeline” self-awareness of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World; a beguiling 32-bit beauty that acts as conduit for an impossible optimism; and an intoxicating surge of hope reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki. It feels new and timeless, just like most dreams on the precipice of fruition.

Reverse Shot: Not to gas you up too much, but I was really struck by your film’s mix of deep, aching sincerity and an aesthetic that nods to childhood imagination, but has been corrupted by gamification, by tech oligarchy.

Julian Glander: That's a good way to put it. The treat of releasing this that I hadn't really expected is getting really generous, thoughtful reads of the movie. It's really helped me understand the movie and myself a lot better than I did when I made it.

RS: Can you tell me a little bit about what you've discovered about the movie and yourself that you weren't necessarily able to perceive or access during the process of making it?

JG: I think one thing that's really kind of funny: basically every review kind of hooks it as an anti-capitalist movie. That had not crossed my mind at all when I was writing it. It may just be that this is a kind of a bigger cultural conversation that we all really want to have. Because for me, it's actually a movie that sits very nicely in capitalism and kind of just explores a dozen different characters' relationships with work. I see Billy as someone who moves through the world and is seeing multiple angles of capital in order to make the best decision that he can within this world. But, yeah, it was not my intention to make an anti-capitalist movie. It was my capitalist movie. It was my intention to make a movie that takes place in something that felt like an honest reality. And maybe that's all you can do.

RS: Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood and adolescence?

JG: Sure, I'll specifically talk about my years in Florida. I moved there when I was, I think, 13, and lived there through high school. I lived outside Tampa in the suburbs. Obviously, the character of Billy is kind of a loose memory of how I felt in high school more than how I actually was. I was somebody who was completely checked out of school. I didn't feel like I was learning anything. I didn't feel like it made any sense to be there, and I would skip school a lot, and was very excited to join the workforce, and of course, looking back, it's like, how foolish I could be to throw away the magic of the high school experience because I was so eager to be an adult. But that was kind of my vibe, or one element of it that I had been really reflecting on during the pandemic.

RS: I think it speaks to a lot of core classic coming of age movies, it's this extreme excitement to be an adult, and you've matured past what your friends are doing. What is interesting about Billy is his cognizance of broader machinations of what's happening around him, and yet his additional willingness to buy into Mr. Moolah.

JG: I guess I would think of Billy as what you would call a sub-genius, where—and I think a lot of people broadly in our generation—we're over educated, and we're smart enough to know that something's really wrong but not really brilliant or tactical or greedy enough to really do anything about it. One element of the movie that I think is very effective in creating a sense of dread is that all the characters are actually very hopeful, every character has some plan or vision of becoming rich. And—because we're seeing them from this dollhouse look, and the camera is always slowly pulling out, and because we live in reality—we just know that it's not going to happen for any of them.

RS: Do you feel that your dreams or aspirations from that age have aligned with what you've been able to do now?

JG: I don't know, I think so. I'm a millennial, so I think as a young person I had more of an idea that I had a future, and I think I had that same crash-out that everyone has when I got out of college and I saw what that actually looked like. When I was 16, I had a friend who was a couple years older, who worked at the IMAX downtown, and I kind of thought I'd get out of school and I'd have a job like that, and I would, like, be in a band, and that would be a great life for a young adult, and that eventually I would end up in corporate America, a creative person turned advertising person, or write for catalogs. And it's funny, because I'm not that old, but nothing in that scenario exists anymore. It's all just evaporated. But I'm very happy with my life. I get to be an artist, and it's hard sometimes, but I've had a great run. It was not my dream at all. My dream was just to get through the days and I don't know, just chill.

RS: You worked in the advertising industry for a bit. Is this around the time you started using Blender as well?

JG: I started using Blender probably 12 years ago. I was around before all the donut tutorials and all the stuff that's known now. I sometimes miss when Blender sucked, because that's when it was my little secret software.

RS: One of the great beauties of the film is the Open Access approach to how it was made. Is there a version where it was not created with Blender and it was used with a different software that was maybe less accessible?

JG: No, I honestly think that if Blender wasn't free, I just never would have started doing 3D. Because at the time, 2013, I was just trying a new thing every day. I was just trying to write new kinds of new genres of music, or, like, experimental fiction or whatever. It really has been life changing.

RS: You said that you have not been back to Florida in a while, and that this is very much like your memories of Florida. Is there anything that is keeping you from going back since the film has been released?

JG: I would say I'm not, like, scared to go back. I'm not scared to face it. It's more neutral than that. Like my parents don't live there. No one I went to high school with is still there, I'm not even sure the places I used to hang out are still there, because they were just, like, Target. I think if I went back to do a tour of special places, or even my high school, it would just be like, okay, it's actually just the same buildings we have here in Pittsburgh. But I did a ton of Google Street View research to make the movie. So in that sense, I feel I have been back.

RS: The notion of eating or being fed seems to be present in your work quite a bit, because in your short “Tennis Balls on His Day Off”, the tennis ball (voiced by Clairo) says, “The algorithm is feeding me a lot of things about the passage of time,” and I think that connects to Boys Go to Jupiter in the content that these characters are consuming. It’s both passive and kind of against their own will, in a way, and it's just ambiently around them. Why is that such a crucial part of your work? How much of that passive consumption is part of your day-to-day field of vision?

JG: It's 100% of my day-to-day field of vision. I am a TikTok scrolling freak. I am on there for four hours a day, and it's like car crashes. Lately, it's been a lot of bad things happening to people on my “for you” page, I don't know. I really wanted it to take place in the general present day that a lot of filmmakers have a hard time with. I think you see a lot of movies where they do this, it's retro, but it's now. It's TV time, but they might have a landline. There's some general notion that it's now, but then everyone's kind of dressed like the ’80s, but they have modern haircuts, but like, every character is listening to post punk.

I cut things that felt very classical. Like, originally, Billy's character was riding a bitchin’ motorbike, instead of a Swagway, and instead of this Mr. Moolah character who kind of guides us through the arc or the structure of the movie, it was like a radio announcer, like Samuel L. Jackson in Do the Right Thing, or the radio announcer in The Warriors and as I was encountering these things in the script, I was, like, this is just not my life experience, this is my movie experience. So we were resisting a lot of that stuff, and I think that's where the passive screen elements just came in, because that is our life now.

RS: My algorithm is birds and shirtless guys. But speaking of birds, I know that you have ducks. Where did this love of creature comforts come from?

JG: It's new. I got them during the pandemic. I just was looking for a reset or a different kind of project. And I got them as babies. They were two days old, and they actually ended up being a huge part of the film. I think the way Billy is accessing this nurturing, caring side of himself that's very new to him was also new to me. It was my first pet ever. I was also not really understanding this fascination with eggs. I had so much anxiety that the ducks were not going to make it to egg-laying age; I would have nightmares. I'd wake up two or three times a night to go and make sure that they were safe, that I had locked up their coop correctly. I was so worried that a predator is going to get them, or that they're going to get sick or something. I was like, I can't do this. And the day that they laid their first egg was such a big deal to me.

RS: I love that. And you and collaborator/cast member Julio Torres also has a thing about eggs.

JG: Oh, my God, that's true. In the context of this movie and a little bit in Problemista they represent something that's more substantial and more ancient than money, like they represent something that's real and nurturing and also just complete and perfect in a way that's kind of irresistible.

RS: We definitely get the aura of Florida. And you've talked about how it's a place where magic had “begun to rot,” but I think what's interesting about this film is that there's a real mystique to the way that you are examining the rocks. And I'm wondering where you continually find that inspiration and sense of imagination, even looking at things that are potentially quite ugly.

JG: I think there’s some irony at play here where we know more than the characters. The way the movie is shot and set up, we are basically looking down from heaven or from somewhere else. And I think to some of the characters, to the little boy Peanut (J.R. Phillips), the world is magic. One takeaway I hope people get from the movie is that through all of this rot and through everything, there are things that are worth paying attention to, and they're happening all around you. And I think it's really just a matter of shifting your focus, of looking for smaller things, looking under rocks, looking at things that you've ignored every day, to try to find the everyday magic in the world.

RS: You worked on this movie for about four years, and as we careen deeper into the absurdities of late capitalism, it feels very potent, but were there things that you adjusted or changed during the development production process as the material circumstances in which you were working were changing?

JG: When I started writing movies, probably 2021, and we were still in this pandemic-induced moment, I feel like there was almost a sense of patriotism towards some working people that we had ignored before, the sense that maybe we could start seeing delivery drivers and Uber drivers and grocery store workers as the heroes that they are and the people who kind of uphold our entire society, and then everyone kind of forgot about that, and things went back to the way they were.

In terms of what changed, or what developed was the new rituals, specifically contactless delivery, which is so humiliating for everyone. Like, it's humiliating for the person doing the work. They're not getting paid enough, they're driving your food around. It's humiliating for the person receiving the food. I always find myself hiding in the window or not sure if I'm supposed to say thank you. And then it also severs the connection you have with the people who prepared your meal, which is actually, like, the best part of going to a restaurant and one of the most sacred things in life. It has stayed that way, and it's antisocial, and it's going to stay that way, even though it's no longer considered a safety precaution or the right thing to do. It's just another thing that we're stuck with.

RS: And yeah, in spite of its inherent antisocial function, the alien that Billy takes care of, Glarba, is broadcasting to other creatures the joy that they are finding in getting this food.

JG: That's true. I think that's what makes Glarba the hero of the movie, that she has access to a joy and an access to seeing the world for the first time. She's an alien visitor. And I think that's like, that's what draws Billy into her. She has the thing that he's losing, the thing that his younger friends still have, that he feels slipping away, that ability to see things.

RS: How do you keep your ability to see things intact?

JG: I don't. I fail all the time, like, and I sometimes fail in a shocking way, where I'll have an incredible experience, and I'll feel, even in that moment, I'm just riding through this.

RS: It's really gratifying to see a movie that doesn't spoon-feed every idea or emotion and just allows the audience to be awash in this universe. But I will leave you with this. You appeared on Jeopardy as a contestant. Did that experience competing for money on TV influence Boys Go to Jupiter at all? And how do you think Billy would love Jeopardy?

JG: I think [Billy would do] probably the same as me. I think he'd go in pretty hot and then see just how hot he actually was. Yeah, for some context, I did not win. I got my ass kicked on Jeopardy. I actually do think that was something that I came out of with my eyes open again, as a former millennial gifted child. I think it was a healthy realization that to be like the identity of a smart person that you can carry to protect yourself or to walk through the world is not useful. The things that are important in life you don't get by being smart, and you see people all the time on Jeopardy and in life, brilliant people who are not getting their fair share under capitalism, and also are oftentimes alienating themselves and not getting their fair share in relationships because they're so stuck on some idea of intelligence or something which is very mechanical and material.

The experience of being on Jeopardy was so much fun. I did about a month of really intense training, which I think I really needed to reactivate my brain coming out of the pandemic. And I made some lifelong friends that day. And I also saw the wheel from the Wheel of Fortune, because it's in the room next door. They keep it covered up by a tarp. But somebody opened the door and the wind blew off a piece of the tarp, and the security guy was like, “Turn around. Don't look at the wheel.”

RS: That's very mysterious.

JG: It's a very sacred object. To go back to the mystic, what's more mystical and moneylicious than the Wheel of Fortune right now? It's the ultimate temptation. It's the ultimate promise that the gods will get you rich.

RS: Yet is entirely dependent on chance.

JG: Yeah. Or is it?