“I watched Stand by Me in preparation for this film,” Isaiah Russell-Bailey said of his role as Caleb Channing in Disney’s Crater, now streaming on Disney+. The film may be set in a lunar mining colony, but it was made in the mold of coming-of-age stories from the 80s, including Stand By Me and The Goonies. So it was inevitable that during a press conference for the new film, the juvenile stars would be asked if they’d ever seen the movies that inspired this one. “I watched it to kind of see who Caleb related to in the film. I felt like he related to River Phoenix's character and Will Wheaton's character. And I tried to add a bit of their characters to Caleb, so I could make Caleb more well-rounded. I love Stand by Me and all those old adventure movies. I've always been a '90s and '80s fan, so watching those movies was really fun.”
(Disney)
Emmy-winner Mckenna Grace has made a big name for herself in films like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and shows like The Handmaid’s Tale. She explained her attraction to the project, which was less about what it emulates and more about the story. “Of course, it's really cool to be able to do something on the moon, but I think that all of the characters had such a unique bond,” she said of her first impressions of the screenplay. “This film ends in a way that surprises me. And it felt like it had a lot of heart in the script. I think that it's quite hard to take a film that is a bunch of kids going on a road trip on the moon and make it feel grounded. And make some of the scenes and dialogue feel quite real. But I think that our director, Mr. Kyle [Patrick Alvarez], did a really good job of that. Reading the script, I don't cry during movies or scripts very easily. But this one, I don't know. The script just felt really special.”
Once cast in the film, the core group of friends went through two weeks of “Moon Camp” to help them fake the difference in gravity. “It's a pretty crazy place,” joked Billy Barratt before explaining that it was actually a Zoom class, not an actual place. “There was a guy, he was very clever, and he knew everything he was talking about. And he was on Zoom, and I remember we sat at a table, and we were just making notes. He would just basically tell us about everything to do with the moon. And pictures and things like that.”
Rounding out the quintet of friends is Borney and Marcus, inseparable besties. “We had a lot of scenes together, so whenever one of us wasn't filming, usually the other one wasn't, as well, because most of the scenes included both of us,” Orson Hong shared about having lots of time on and off screen to bond. “We spent a lot of time outside of set together, and I feel like that really helped develop our relationship.” Thomas Boyce III added, “I remember having a conversation with Kyle. I was saying something like, ‘Wow, this is cast so perfectly. Me and Orson, we just love hanging out together.’ And he kind of patted himself on the back, like, hey, you know, he had the vision. He knew.Orson and I just loved hanging out with each other. And man, I wish we had some of the scenes where we would all just, like, burst into tears, laughing. And this goes for everybody in the cast. Some of our most serious scenes, we would just be laughing. We'd have takes where we were just laughing through them. we all had so much fun, and Orson and I just really got along in real life. And it translated well on screen. I loved having scenes with him.”
For the young stars of Crater, there was lots of fun off screen with pool parties, paintball, and video game sessions, but filming some of the lighter-than-air sequences gave them a lot of on-screen fun, too. “It was kind of like skydiving a little bit,” Isaiah Russell-Bailey said of the wire work that replicated the moon’s gravity, which is 1/6th of Earth’s. “It was really cool. I would say that the stunt that I liked the most was having to pick up Billy and run across the moon while meteors were flying at us. I just thought it was cool because I kind of felt like Captain America saving Tony Stark while I was picking him up. o, it was definitely a little bit of an ego boost. It was a really nice stunt.”
You can see Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Mckenna Grace, Billy Barratt, Orson Hong, and Thomas Boyce III in Disney’s Crater, now streaming on Disney+. Click here to read our interview with Thomas Boyce III.