About the Film

Spaceboy is director Ransom Riggs' graduate thesis for the University of Southern California's MFA film and television production program. Among the first films to pioneer true Hi-Definition production and post-production at USC, its ambitious scope and compelling story attracted a stellar crew, including Emmy-winning production designer Richard Lewis and casting director Robert McGee (The Virgin Suicides). In addition, several companies generously donated their time and talents to the project, including VFX house Framework (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Red Dragon) and design team Shoolery Design (Lord of the Rings, Saw). Spaceboy is currently being submitted to film festivals around the world.

The Story

Fifteen-year-old Max is an intense, isolated kid whose one true passion is something no one he knows can relate to: the search for UFOs. Dubbed "Spaceboy" by his classmates and his vain older brother Percy, alienated Max withdraws almost completely into the comfortable escapism of his obsession. So when he experiences a Close Encounter after a particularly traumatizing day at school, even Max has to wonder: is he really making Contact, or is it just a manifestation of his deep need to belong?

Just when he's beginning to suspect he's not alone in the universe, however, something even stranger happens: his brother's cool, punky girlfriend, Carrie, takes an interest in him. In the end, Max finds himself torn between two worlds -- the alien one into which he's always longed to escape and the human which, thanks to Carrie, seems to be within reach for the first time.

The Tone

Spaceboy will capture the strangeness of a boy caught between two worlds, suspended in a kind of twilight zone between Earth and space, childhood and adulthood, sleep and waking. Max feels like an alien in that most normalized of landscapes -- American suburbia -- which the film will plumb for all the strangeness that lies subtly below its polished surface.

That said, Spaceboy intends to invest suburbia with an alienness more foreboding than what you'd find on the surface of Mars itself, and to suggest that there is another way of looking at the world which surrounds us, one which pierces through what seems normal to find what is strange.

Personal Relevance

This is a story I've been trying to tell, one way or another, all my life. At its core, it deals with the adolescent search for self-identity, which was all the more complex for me, growing up without a father. Similarly, Max, who has been made to feel like a stranger in his own town -- his own skin, even -- has no compass: he not only looks outside the family unit for clues about himself, as I did, but outside of the human family altogether! Naturally: it's easier for him to believe he's an alien than to accept that he's a failed human being. What Max doesn't know is something that takes many of us years to discover: that there are others like him, and that he belongs in the last place he ever thought he'd feel at home: right where he is.