The movie, based on an award winning short story by David Gerrold, revolves around David, a recently widowed science fiction writer, who decides to adopt a young orphaned boy who claims to be from Mars, Dennis. The two are quite different from each other, but they also share this sense of not fitting. The boy exhibits some pretty strange behavior and a series of inexplicable events leads David to wonder whether the boy’s claims are indeed based on fantasy… Or reality. Whatever the true origins of this remarkable little boy, David finds himself growing more attached to him and experiencing the transformational power of parental love.

I met with the cast and producers of this exciting new project by New Line Cinema, “a longtime labor of love,” as producers David Kirschner and Corey Sienega describe it. The project took almost 10 years to become reality. “We fought for the rights to the story and lost them, but then luckily got them back.”

“What was very moving to me when I read the story was the relationship between father and son,” says Kirschner, explaining how the two actors worked a great deal in establishing this love connection and make it grow in the movie.

John Cusack and the director, Menno Meyjes, decided to shot the film in chronological order while Cusack refrained from meeting with Bobby Coleman, his young counterpart, during the early weeks of filming, when off-camera. This approach was very useful in allowing Cusack to develop his character’s relationship with that of Bobby in natural progression.

“I wanted to sort of discover the relationship on camera and work with him,” says Cusack. “And I also wanted him to develop his own relationship with Menno, and his character. So much of the film is these two people just kind of trying to share the same space and communicate. So I didn’t want to become too close with him too quickly. I just wanted to let it develop naturally.”

And in the movie, Cusack makes Bobby’s characters shine. “Bobby is a great kid,” he says. “I think children in general are magnificent and magical, the way they look at the world. He’s been able to come up with this character and inhabit it, which I think kids are so good at doing. And he’s good because he’s really able to articulate it and he has great confidence in it.”

While the love story between father and son plays a very important role in the movie, the sci-fi side is a beautiful element in the story… And a metaphor for alienation and social inadaptability, as the producers explains. “Dennis is a kid who doesn’t quite fit in with the norms of what society is supposed to be,” Kirschner says. “I thik all of us go through a point in our lives were ‘Martians.’ We don’t fit in, we’re from another planet. Sometimes it’s when you’re a grownup, sometimes it’s when you’re a kid and sometimes it’s every day.”

Bobby Coleman, who was only 8 at the beginning of production, has his unique interpretation of his character. “Dennis mission is to figure out what human beings do on earth,” he says. “It’s really hard for him to live and all the humans in the group home push him around. He has mean kids around him but he does not know they’re mean because he thinks they’re just being normal. And they pretty much are because everyone’s mean sometimes.”

Haven’t we all gone through this?