An Interview with Peter Harness & Michelle MacLaren from ‘Constellation’

Key art from ‘Constellation’ Courtesy of Apple.

Peter Harness and Michelle MacLaren are a pair of highly accomplished creatives in the industry and currently, they serve as the Creator and Lead Director/Executive Producer of the new Apple TV+ series, Constellation, respectively. And we here at NTG had the wonderful honor of sitting down with both of them to discuss this new show.
 
John Betancourt: I would love to know what created or inspired the creation of this expansive and amazing story?
 
Peter Harness: Well, it was, it was. It was It started with a ghost story. For me, it started once upon a time I was on, I was on holiday in a cabin in the woods in Sweden. And every night, as dusk fell, we would hear this voice of a little girl coming from the forest. And she was just calling “mama, mama.” And, you know, we went out to try and find where this little girl was, and, you know, we couldn't hear her anymore, and there didn't seem to be anywhere where she could be. And we looked for another house, you know, in the days following, and we never found one. And she would come kind of again, that nightfall. And I mean, I don't know, I don't know what that was, but it stuck with me. And when I was asked to, to write something about the experience of being an astronaut and the experience of returning to Earth, I got very excited about, you know, the spookiness of space and the kind of the mysteries and ghost stories that that you hear. And there was this image of, of a mother trapped on onboard the ISS desperately trying to get back to her daughter. And I kind of remember that, that ghost girl in the forest, looking for her mum, and I realized that they were mother and daughter. And they, these were two people that I had to bring together. And that was really the story of the show. And obviously, there are lots of other things in it that I was desperate to write about, and lots of other characters who emerged, and I fell in love with, and I had to tell their stories as well. But it's, it's the germ of the idea is about a mum being separated from her daughter in the most profound way you can, and, and how they managed to get back together again. Or do they?
 
John Betancourt: A question for Michelle, I am very curious what motivated you to want to come on as an executive producer and a director?
 
Michelle MacLaren: I read the first two scripts, and I loved them, they spoke to me visually, they were very challenging, creatively, and execution wise, I had never worked in space and zero gravity. And that fascinated me, I loved the mother/daughter relationship. I love the challenge there. I love that there was a catastrophe in space, and they had to figure out a way to get home to fight for survival. And so creatively it was it was very challenging, I like to do something I haven't done before, and I never shot in space. And, and so I was very attracted to doing it, to the powerful characters and, and great writing. So that's why I jumped in.
 
John Betancourt: Michelle, I noticed as a director, there's stuff that you did here that I've never seen you do before that has tiny echoes of other influences behind it. What as a director, did you did you use it influences to kind of bring together some of those visuals?
 
Michelle MacLaren: Well, I think that there's a number of different genres at work in this piece, and I pulled on those different genres, whether it's a drama, or a thriller or horror. I really love subjective storytelling. I like to take the audience and put them into the character's head and have you experience this journey with them. But there's also a sense of voyeurism that I wanted to bring to it and somewhat paranoia to when Jo's on the ISS, you want to feel the intimacy of her confinement and it's claustrophobic. But then I jumped back wide to give you a sense of geography and also wonder, is she alone? Is there somebody else there? Somebody watching her and we wanted to bring in the sense of voyeurism, And the show is very intricately interwoven, in that we set up certain things at the beginning that are paid off at the end. So, Joseph Cedar and I worked there, and Oliver Hirschbiegel and I worked very close together to set it up and pay it off. And sometimes in the beginning, you'll have a shot where you might think it's, it's an objective angle, and you're gonna realize later that it's actually somebody's POV. But you don't get that payoff until many episodes later. And I do think that there's a lot of easter eggs that are planted at the beginning. And I hope that when people get to the end that they're very happy. They love the show, they're very satisfied and curious to go back and see if they watch it again, if they'll actually notice more easter eggs, because there's a lot, there's a lot in there.
 
John Betancourt: Now, Peter, I have a similar question as a writer because again, this has so many wonderful genre pieces, and you've spoken to your experiences, putting it together, what influences did you put into the story to craft this.
 
Peter Harness: To be perfectly honest, I kind of… I've spent a lot of my time writing as, as many kinds of screenwriters do, you know, adapting books and adapting other people's things. And, and a few years ago, I thought, you know, this has been wonderful, and I've enjoyed doing this, but, you know, I want to write something that is just me. And, you know, I'm not going to take any other work, I'm going to go all out to do this, and make something which is, which is just me. So really, to be enormously big headed about it. I just wanted to write something that kind of was in, you know, what I would write if you if you just gave me complete freedom to do it. I wanted to do that just once and try it. So, you know, this, this is the result of that. And I take all the blame for it. But I didn't, you know, I tried very consciously not to be influenced by a bunch of stuff that I that I read. I just wanted, you know, I just wanted to get everything that was driving me crazy up there out on a page and give it to somebody to take it away.
 
John Betancourt: The last question that I have for each of you today, if you had to describe this series, in one word, what would that word be?
 
Michelle MacLaren: Spectacular.
 
Peter Harness: I can't do it in one word, but it's… yes, I can. It's Alice.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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