Glasgow Film Festival Interview: Julian Glander discusses the process of making his first feature, Boys Go To Jupiter

In six years of covering the Glasgow Film Festival, my favourite discovery has been the work of Julian Glander. Though he’s made all sorts of different art, he’s best known for his animated shorts. Surreal, abstract, hilarious, often surprisingly moving, his vivid 3D worlds are a delight to inhabit, and their musical interludes can get stuck in your head for days.

Boys Go To Jupiter, showing at the festival, is his debut feature. Set in Florida in the week between Christmas and New Year, it follows 16- year-old Billy 5000, a food delivery driver, who’s attempting to save up $5000. All sorts of things stand in his way – from the cruelties of capitalism to space aliens. The voice cast includes Jack Corbett, Janine Garofalo, Elsie Fisher, Julio Torres, Tavi Gevinson, and Sarah Sherman.

I chatted with Glander on Zoom about the process of making his first feature.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

How have you found doing press for Boy Go To Jupiter? I guess with this being your first feature, you wouldn’t have done publicity for this long before?

I am loving it! I’ve been taking about the movie to press for about 6 months now, and I’m right at the perfect moment where I think I finally, after answering the questions over and over again, understand the movie. I can actually explain it, but I’m not sick of it yet. I’m having a really good time.

So talking about your movie has helped you understand it more?

I think one of the big points of satisfaction of making a movie is getting to talk about it over and over and over, and just hearing what resonated with different people. A lot of it’s been surprising to me – I think some of the threads in the movie about the gig economy, and about the state of capitalism right now, were really background for me when I was writing, and those are the things that have resonated with people the most.

I was actually going to ask more about that! I’ve been watching some of your shorts and the state of capitalism also comes up in films like Tennis Ball on His Day Off and Dolphin Poem, so even so you say it’s more in the background for you, it keeps coming through.

I did a Q and A with Julio Torres recently,  and his movie Problemista talks about a lot of the same stuff, the gig economy and the state of freelance. I think every movie should have an element of this. It’s kind of shocking to me that every movie isn’t talking about the gig economy because we’re all living in it, and it surrounds us even as neutral background. It’s also very new and we still don’t really understand it .

I think we’re at a moment as a culture where, okay, we were promised the technological revolution, we were promised that our relationship with work would change, and that we’d all be our own bosses and be running these little, small independent businesses for ourselves, and that it would make all of our lives better. We’re now at a moment where I think it’s pretty clear that it’s made our lives worse, and so the question that keeps coming up in conversations I have is what do we do about that?

I find it really interesting the way those themes contrast with your visual style, which is so bright and funny.

If someone was just reading this interview they would think this was the most depressing movie ever, and it’s really not! It’s a fun movie, it’s very light, it’s really driven by some interesting and outrageous characters.

This is a lot of what adolescence is about – the feeling of discovering just how dark and rough the world could be, but then at the same time being able to find love and beauty and little moments of joy and satisfaction within that. It’s very easy to be dour on the state of the world, but then if you think back to your own life, if you think back to your summers or your winter breaks as a teenager, you may not remember what the economy was like, but you’ll remember having a good time with your friends or falling in love for the first time. I think that’s what I was trying to distil more than anything.

How did you end up casting Jack Corbett as Billy 5000?

I think people who are online as much as I am know Jack from his NPR Planet Money Tiktoks. I messaged him four years ago, and just said, “Hey, I’m writing something – would you be interested in doing voice acting for a cartoon?”  He was like, “Yeah sure, keep me in the loop”. I kind of wrote the whole movie for him without really telling him that!

I mean, Jack’s point of view on the economy was such a big influence. There are parts of the movie that we wrote together – one of my favourite parts is this section where he’s reading some very dense economic theory from the late 1800s. We were in the booth, and I didn’t have anything written in the script, I just had it in brackets, “Billy 5000 reads some economic theory.” Jack pulled up this very convoluted British passage that’s like, the fish represents man and he will crawl out of the mud because market forces want him to be in the water instead of in the mud… and from that we wrote together this passage about snails and ants and how that relates to the economy.

Jack brought so much to the movie, and actually when I sent him the script, he wrote me back right away and said he used to be Uber eats driver in college. So just one of those magic things!

I saw somewhere you said that he was only in the recording booth for 8 hours, so that must have been pretty intense!

He took a chance to do this; he’s never done anything like this before. Within the 8-hour session he sang 5 songs and recorded the entire movie’s worth of dialogue. I mean, for the whole voice recording, for the whole cast, we’re up against the deadline of the [2023 SAG-AFTRA] strike. We were working really intense short sessions just to get everything done. He came totally prepared: he came with the script printed out, and he had notes for every page. The movie just doesn’t work without him doing that, without all the cast doing that. It makes my job a lot easier.

How do you go about deciding a scene should be in song?

There were moments when I was writing the script where if I didn’t know what to do, I’d just put in brackets, ‘Musical moment here’. Then I would come back later and just be fiddling around on the guitar and write. Here we want to know that our main character’s feeling a little lost and aimless, what if we just write that out in the most literal way and then refine it from there?

What we ended up with from working with the voice cast was a set of about a dozen songs that are really in the character’s voices and sonically sound like the world of the characters. The whole sonic palette of the movie is this very DIY drum machine and synth and rough guitar thing that does sound like if a 16-year-old boy was making it in his garage in Florida.

What did you find most surprising about working in long form for the first time?

One thing that I found actually pleasantly surprising was that if I just worked at it a little bit every day, I made a lot of progress. I was as an illustrator, I was really used to all-nighters and quick sprint deadlines. I thought that the best way to work would be to drink an energy drink and stay up for three days and make a piece and then crash. That was not sustainable, but what I found was if I woke up and worked all day and then cut myself off when it was time for dinner, I could go into the next day with a little bit of energy and with a little bit of an idea of what I needed to do. This was a pretty intense animation production process, but I think the best thing I did was give myself one day a week off. This slow and steady thing was very new for me, very unfamiliar, but it worked.

Can you see yourself doing another feature in the near future?

I would love to. I’d love to start one today!  I am writing a script for a new one, but I have also in the past done comics and video games. It’s been a long time since I’ve made a video game and I do love them, so I don’t know…

I’m still very much in the world of this movie, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make sure people see it. But I absolutely had the best time of my life making this, and I’d love to do another one.