Episode Details

Recorded at Fantastic Fest 2026 in Austin, No Film School founder Ryan Koo talks with Into the Sky writer-directors Drew Mylrea and Evan Buxbaum about the decade-long path to making their sci-fi comedy. They trace the project from an early script that Evan initially rejected through Black List evaluations, financing, casting Sam Richardson, and an ambitious 25-day production with dozens of locations and hundreds of VFX shots. Drew and Evan also explain how they divided responsibilities as co-directors, used LiDAR scans and Lego figures to pre-visualize scenes, navigated production setbacks, tested unfinished cuts with audiences, and learned to trust their instincts while making an independent film designed to feel like a blockbuster.

In this episode, No Film School's Ryan Koo and guests Drew Mylrea and Evan Buxbaum discuss...

• How Drew and Evan became filmmaking collaborators after spending hours together shooting a Method soap commercial in a tiny shower

• Evan’s experience making Sun Belt Express and the long gap between his first and second features

• Why Drew kept returning to the alien-abduction concept that eventually became Into the Sky

• Revisiting old material after years of becoming better writers and filmmakers

• How strong Black List evaluations gave the filmmakers psychological momentum to commit to the project

• Spending roughly two years rewriting the script and assembling financing

• Why casting director Kate Geller became an important part of building the movie’s cast

• How attaching Sam Richardson helped the project gain momentum

• The pressures created when an in-demand actor gives an independent production a narrow shooting window

• Walking away from a “turnkey” production-services solution that would have forced most of the movie onto a single estate

• Finding the town of Catskill, New York, and rebuilding their location strategy around what the movie actually needed

• Why filmmakers sometimes have to reject the easiest logistical solution when it threatens the film creatively

• Shooting the movie in 25 days while managing frequent company moves

• How Drew and Evan divided directing responsibilities according to their complementary strengths

• Drew’s focus on visual storytelling, camera placement, and spectacle versus Evan’s focus on performance, character, and dialogue

• Using iPhone LiDAR scans and Polycam to create digital models of locations

• Printing location blueprints and using custom Lego figures and a Lego camera to block scenes with the AD and cinematographer

• Building detailed storyboards and turning them into rough animatics for complicated sequences

• Trying to create an “indie blockbuster” without a blockbuster budget

• The challenge of completing approximately 500 visual-effects shots with an extremely small VFX team

• Why extensive preparation became a starting point for improvisation once production problems appeared

• Delaying a cornfield sequence until the final day of photography so the corn would be tall enough for the scene

• How rain, heat, scheduling problems, and other uncontrollable factors reshaped the production

• Watching dailies and determining whether scenes needed to be reshot

• Why a scene they believed needed a reshoot ultimately used mostly material from the original shoot

• Working 12-hour shooting days followed by another four or five hours of preparation each night

• Splitting up the first stages of post-production so Drew could eventually watch the assembly with fresh eyes