Daniel Espinosa Talks Inspiration For Life, Reuniting With Ryan Reynolds

This weekend, Life will introduce moviegoers to a brand new encounter with an extraterrestrial being. The sci-fi thrill ride pits six astronauts in an inescapable space station setting with an aggressive and growing creature.

Much of the film appears to pride itself on presenting its alien, scientists, and setting in a grounded, realistic setting. This fact often makes the film that much scarier but also richer as the scientists glide through their habitat in beautifully shot zero gravity scenes, spewing some lines of science jargon in their laborities and applying the research from the film’s writers and director to the big screen.

More than a potentially accurate representation of an alien encounter, Life is thriller. It is unstoppable and this is thanks to its director Daniel Espinosa who previously dove into projects such as Safe House and Easy Money.

“I thought to myself, what makes a difference for me when I read [the script for Life] was those two turns that are connected to a different kind of genre that normally is not connected to Science Fiction, except with Twilight Zone, which I dug when that was out,” Espinosa told ComicBook.com. “But it was also the realism. The notion that this could take place tomorrow. That it wasn’t like a neo punk dystopian future. It was like now.”

“I got the Neill DeGrasse Tyson of geneticists of Great Britain, this kind of brilliant man who writes this book about how life starts and how we kind of evolved,” Espinosa said. “Not we, but the species of the world, of Earth. How they went and slowly evolved to become what they are. A specialist on evolution.”

“I talked to him and I went, ‘Okay if you found this cell…’ And we kind of game him the rules from the script. ‘If you found this, how would you assume that it would develop? If he has to develop to this size at this point and he’s developing in zero gravity?’ Which means that if you’re a one cellular being, you can change all your parts.”

“It’s simple,” Espinosa concluded. “If space is eternal, the possibilities are eternal.”

The film, which Espinosa clearly poured an extra effort into, was not his first with one of its top billed actors. Safe House saw Espinosa teamed with Ryan Reynolds for a thrilling, though more grounded, adventure with Denzel Washington. For Espinosa, the reunion was sweet, although he worried it almost wouldn’t happen.

“That was so nice, man,” Espinosa said of the reunion. “I’d been kind of looking for a movie to do together with Ryan since we did Safe House, but I hadn’t really found anything. Both me and him were like out in our careers. Then, suddenly, I got this movie and I was about to call him. I thought, ‘I’ll call him next week.’ Then a week went by and I thought, ‘I’ll call him next week.’”

Then came a little movie called Deadpool.

“Then somebody called me, ‘Have you called Ryan?’” Espinosa said. “I go like, ‘No, no. I haven’t called Ryan yet.’ He’s like, ‘Have you looked at Box Office MoJo?’ I go, ‘No.’ ‘Yeah, his movie just came out, that Deadpool.’” The movie was a smash hit, breaking records for R-rated films, and launching Reynolds into a new tier of Hollywood fame. “Like boom, it was like the biggest movie on the planet,” Espinosa said. “I was like, ‘Oh, f— me! Why didn’t I call him? He’s like the biggest actor on the planet.’ I thought he was going to tell me to f— off, but he was nice.”

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The rest is history and can be seen in theaters when Life releases nationwide on March 24.