Not since the thrilling HALO shot of Mission: Impossible – Fallout has a film let audiences sail from such dizzying degrees. But the stunts that Tom Cruise and his team pull off in that Hollywood blockbuster don’t have a lick on the feats that skydiver and aerial cinematographer Joe Jennings executes in Space Cowboy. The film, which has its world premiere in the TIFF Docs programme at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows Jennings as he embarks on his boldest jump yet: to drop a car from the sky and execute a perfect landing.
That feat might sound bonkers, but it’s an extension of Jennings’ lifetime of defying the impossible from miles above. Directors Bryce Leavitt and Marah Strauch unfold the tale of Jennings’ rise in the skydiving world. He goes from devising these artistic set-ups in the sky, like people sitting at a bistro table while plummeting to the ground, and eventually honing his aerial eye in commercials, Hollywood movies, and as a spearhead in the X Games for extreme sports. Fuelled by truly awesome cinematography and a bracing sense of aliveness, Space Cowboy is a thrilling ticket for audiences who went sky high for Sunshine Superman, as well as this year’s equally dazzling cautionary tales of epic adventures, Skywalkers: A Love Story and Fly.
Leavitt, making his feature debut here, draws from a career in basketball, while Strauch follows her 2014 breakthrough Sunshine Superman, about BASE jumper Carl Boenish who strapped 16mm to his helmet while leaping from various ledges, and her 2021 doc Vice Versa: Chyna, about WWE wrestler Joanie “Chyna” Laurer. Similar to those films, the adrenaline rush of the sport in Space Cowboy is merely a starting point for a deeper dive. The film evolves into a grounded odyssey through family ties, mental health struggles, and personal loss in pursuit of one’s passion.
POV spoke with Strauch and Leavitt via Zoom ahead of the TIFF premiere of Space Cowboy.
POV: Pat Mullen
BL: Bryce Leavitt
MS: Marah Strauch
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: How did you first meet Joe Jennings?
BL: Back in 2018, I was working on a small clothing brand commercial and randomly stumbled upon Joe. I was blown away by his career and I asked him a million questions the day I met him out of fascination. We struck up a little friendship and stayed in touch. As time passed, I learned more about his story and some of the things he’s dealt with in his personal life and his family life, and was even more fascinated by that. That’s when I realized there might be something worth pursuing. At that time, I hadn’t made any films, so I needed to reach out and figure out how to make one. One of the first people that I reached out to was Marah because she had made Sunshine Superman, which had a similar subject matter and was an incredible film. I slowly made her a co-conspirator in this madness.
POV: Marah, what inspired you to sail through the air again after Sunshine Superman?
MS: I never thought that I would make another film about skydiving or BASE jumping, and I never thought I would co-direct a movie, but there was a lot of coincidences, like the camera that was used in Space Cowboy by Joe Jennings was also used by Carl Boenish in Sunshine Superman. Although it similarities to Sunshine Superman in terms of topic, peripherally, with BASE jumping and skydiving, there’s this other level of mental health and male friendship that was really interesting to me and quite different. And there was the archive, similarly. I felt like I could have a lot to add being an editor who also directs.
POV: The mental health element to the story works its way into the film nicely and gives a lot of power to the final acts. Was this something that you were aware of from the outset of making the film or did it come through during the edit?
BL: I think it was both, really. It was there in the early stages developing the film. I had some talks with Joe. He opened up to me about his depression and some childhood trauma he had dealt with and his struggles with mental health. That really resonated with me. I felt like that could take what normally would’ve been made in the extreme sports space and become a globally empathetic film. Marah and her editing partner Eric Bruggemann and J. Davis, they got way deeper into the edit to figure out how we were going to thread that
MS: I don’t really make films about extreme sports athletes, although I’ve now created three films about extreme sports athletes. I like films about people, films that have emotions and have relationships. This story should play to an audience that’s wider than skydiving. When Bryce started talking about ADHD and depression and I thought that’s a project I can really get behind because Joe is such an interesting example of somebody who found the perfect path for himself in life. Of course, we learned more as we did the interviews and as we did the edit because there’s all this footage to back that up. As a documentarian, you’re just like, “Thank you for filming that.” There was enough to support that with Joe’s story and also Sissy and Joey and the family dynamic, which to me as a woman, I thought had to be part of the story, which was a fight at times with financiers. To me, it’s what makes the film able to play at TIFF or to larger audiences.
POV: Whereabouts in Joe’s story did you begin filming in terms of his process with the cars? Since he’s documented his whole life, I was trying to figure where the story begins, so to speak.
BL: When I met Joe, he was close to turning 60 and he was still working full speed doing these projects and chasing new stunts. My mind said there’s enough material and story here that you could do a traditional cradle-to-the-grave / best hits of his life and make a historical piece with talking heads and archive, but it’s deeper and a more intriguing story if we add in what he was doing in the present day.
The big question was, “What do we film him doing?” Joe expressed to us that he was still actively, as he called it, “trying to make a car fly perfectly.” That perfectly encapsulated the signature thing he’d been doing with his career, but also it was a good mirror and revealer for the personal things we’ve been talking about with obsession, ADHD, and calming your brain down. He was just in his element. If you put a chef on camera, you probably won’t get as good of answers from them as you would if you put on camera while they’re cooking.
MS: We also wanted to have an element that was intimate but also visual to add our own signature to the film in terms of the footage. Our DP, Tony Johannson, who I worked with on my last project, did such a good job of mixing where we’re going from archival to present day with this car stunt.
POV: Did you guys ever talk about doing the jump with your DP and Joe? How do you get someone to strap on a camera and go along for that ride?
MS: It’s a whole thing being an aerial cinematographer, so none of us went up. It was just not feasible because it’s highly skilled, and this is what Joe does. Our hope was to have something that we were planning, helping choreograph, and coming up with how it’s going to look aesthetically, but Joe is the expert here. Our DP helped in terms of camera use and what we should do in terms of matching footage on the ground. But the aerial sequences just made so much more sense for Joe’s team to do. I said this with Sunshine Superman: Documentarians do not have to do all the things that their subjects do.
BL: It’s definitely something we wanted to leave to the professionals, both for safety and for the quality of the film that came out of it. But the other part as you see in the film for Joe setting up and executing these stunts is only half of the puzzle. How he films it and how he choreographs his team to film it so that he can share it with people on the ground is what sparks his fire. We showed the process of him setting up how it was going to be filmed in the air because that’s his craft, which is a unique thing about following a cinematographer. Our crew shot stuff going on in the plane, but everything in between up there in the clouds, that was all Joe.
POV: How does it work with the people on the ground? I was wondering this all throughout the film: there’s a car hurtling towards the ground and it flattens pretty badly on impact, so I wouldn’t really want to be the one down there with a camera trying to get that shot. How does it work coordinating that shot?
MS: It was amazing. I think we had 24 cameras on the ground and we had a big truck that we put another cameraperson on and they were doing telephoto shots from the top of a truck. We were a ways back and as the car was landing, our team had to go towards them in a pickup truck so that we could get the footage of their landing. They were filming as they were landing as well, but it was a coordinated effort to get in the moment as they were landing. Getting the car flying through the sky was this amazing work of this local aerial DP who was able to get this footage. It was an effort from a huge team. With documentaries, you often think of small teams, but this was a 50 person team to get those last shots.
POV: Going back to Sunshine Superman, Carl had passed in one of his jumps, but Joe is still living and taking extremely risky jumps even though he’s quite safety conscious. How is it making a film sort of when a subject is in a life or death situation every time you’re carrying the story forward?
MS: Every film I’ve made has somebody who has died. This is my third feature. The first two were people that had died, and this film felt different because you’re maintaining a relationship with somebody who is alive and telling their story. The risk that we were seeing was in the big stunt. We weren’t following him day to day otherwise. Joe is very meticulous and people have died around him, but he’s remained, which is also this really interesting in terms of grief. He’s a survivor in this sport. I felt very much like a detective on Sunshine Superman, and in this one, I felt much more like a psychologist. It is a very different interplay with the subject in this film.
BL: Professional skydivers are incredibly meticulous. There’s a science to what they’re doing and there’s thrill and adrenaline with what they’re doing, but they’re not chasing death. They all have families that they plan on going home to every day. That was another reason we wanted to show this car stunt because you see how much actually goes into the planning of it before they drop it. They have to pick up a specific car, they alter it, then they test it, then they alter it some more. There are all these things that go into not only Joe trying to push the limits and get these incredible images, but also to do it safely and responsibly. I personally didn’t have too much anxiety about that part of it at any point. The only time was that day when the car was dropping from the sky. I do remember being down on the ground in the desert and there were 20 cameras, a helicopter, people running around on walkie talkies, and everything was now out of our control.
POV: Bryce, you played basketball for a number of years, so how does your background in sport inform your approach to making a film like Space Cowboy?
BL: Basketball and a lifetime of sports gave me a level of competitive relentlessness that helped me wake up every day and consistently push this thing for the last five years to get it made. Then there’s everything that comes with that: some work ethic, some teamwork, and problem solving. But the sport part helped with my initial connection with Joe, with his experience with the X Games and me being an athlete who’s also had some mental health struggles. I found something that really resonated with me within this in relation to what it feels like when other people think you have the coolest job in the world and think you should be the happiest person, but on the inside you’re struggling with the same things as everybody else.
POV: What was the process of expanding the story beyond Joe? There’s the sequence where one of his colleagues is killed in the Mountain Dew commercial and it weaves with the macro/micro levels.
MS: When Bryce came to me, he had this huge pile of different people that we could add to the story. As a filmmaker, I always try to narrow things as much as possible. It was about figuring out how narrow or wide we could make it and still make it feel like it’s about Joe, meaning everybody in the story should be an extension of Joe’s experience. Rob Harris was Joe’s partner. I would say as much as Sunshine Superman was a love story, this is too with Rob Harris and Joe. Deciding where these people intersect with Joe was really our guiding star. If they didn’t have an intersection with him, we didn’t go there.
POV: Space Cowboy sits nicely in conversation with films this year like Skywalkers and Fly. At a time where documentaries doing really well on streaming, there’s a set of films that are really reminding us of the importance of seeing documentary as a big screen experience. Can you talk a bit about using the visual plane of the film in documentary?
BL: It really is a spectacle. It’s a visual feast. Good stories are supposed to take a viewer to a new world, and this one happens to take them there visually because of Joe’s incredible work and all the beautiful images and beautiful stunts he’s choreographed in the sky. It’s a different experience to see it on the big screen.
MS: For me, it’s an extension of Sunshine Superman, in a way, in terms of the visual sensibility. Early on, I was told in my career as a documentarian, “Why do you need to use this camera? Why do you need to do it this way? Why do you need to have it be large for a big screen?” I think it should be in the same world as scripted. And I think there’s often this talk that documentaries should be smaller. I think they should be bigger. The documentaries I came up loving, like Man on Wire or Riding Giants, are the films that inform me. If they’re having a moment right now, that’s exciting. I think we need more of that.
POV: What might you say if people express concerns that Space Cowboy could inspire some risky behaviour?
BL: If you watch the film and watch what Joe’s gone through to learn his process, you can see how meticulous he and his crew are about safety. For Maras and I being able to sleep okay at night, we have the built in cheat code in that I don’t think there is a drop zone in the world that a civilian can go to and ask to throw a car out of a plane. You have to be a very specific person with a very specific VIP card to have a pilot allow you to put an automobile in their aircraft and then throw it out.
MS: You could think of risk in peoples’ lives as not dangerous or death-defying. We always hope to inspire people to take whatever they feel is a risk.
POV: What would the biggest risk you’ve taken in your careers as filmmakers be so far?
BL: For me it was this. I was retiring from professional basketball and pursuing a film when I had zero experience in filmmaking. So this project was my biggest risk and see it come to fruition was rewarding.
MS: I could see a lot of myself in Bryce when he came to me at the beginning of this process. My background was in visual art and I was actually a glass blower before I was a filmmaker. I had a very eclectic background and I just started making a documentary because it was amazing footage and it just seemed like the right thing to do. I had a very similar experience with Sunshine Superman where I had to go all in and I saw Bryce was going all in. That’s something I admire in other filmmakers and I think it’s necessary in order to get this kind of film made.
