Dispatch • Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, and the Tender Mystery of 'Remarkably Bright Creatures'

Late in Remarkably Bright Creatures, Mary Ann (Kathy Baker) puts words to Tova’s condition. Tova (Sally Field), she tells her, has stopped being in the “business of living.” The line clarifies Tova’s dilemma: she hasn’t simply been grieving the loss of her son years ago; she’s been building a life around grief so gradually that its walls have begun to resemble an emotional shelter. But what once helped her survive has begun to keep the world out.

In this case, the way back begins at an aquarium tank.

Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel and directed by Olivia Newman, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Whittington, Remarkably Bright Creatures stars Field as Tova, a widow who cleans an aquarium. There, she forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus, an octopus voiced by Alfred Molina, who has a gift for seeing what humans miss. Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, a directionless man in his 30s who wanders into Tova’s orbit with old hurt of his own. What Marcellus recognizes in both of them becomes the center of a story about loneliness, found family, and the slow return to the business of living.

At a For Your Consideration (FYC) panel for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28, moderated by Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger, the film’s cast and creative team reflected on bringing that unlikely emotional triangle to the screen. Field joined Pullman and Newman, alongside Van Pelt, producer Bryan Unkeless, cinematographer Ashley Connor, and visual effects supervisor Chris Ritvo.

Van Pelt began with the origin of Tova. As an only child growing up in Tacoma, she lived next door to her grandmother, a Swedish immigrant who cleaned church basements and community centers into her eighties—not because she needed the money, but because sitting still simply wasn’t in her. “She liked doing it. She liked being there at night,” Van Pelt recalled.

Marcellus arrived first, born from a continuing education writing class and Van Pelt’s fascination with videos of octopuses escaping their enclosures. Tova followed because Marcellus needed a human to observe. The pieces fit together the way origin stories rarely do: a grandmother who couldn’t stop moving, videos of octopuses sneaking out of their tanks, and a writer slowly realizing that grief might be easier to approach through a creature with eight arms and a cynical opinion of people.

Unkeless read the manuscript before publication and described it as “so heartfelt and just like a hug.” “It reminded me of people I had lost, and so I really connected in such a pure way,” he said.

Almost immediately, Unkeless thought of Field. He wasn’t alone. Van Pelt had pictured Field as Tova while writing the book, years before any film adaptation; Newman pictured her while drafting the screenplay. Field, for her part, was involved early and knew almost immediately that Tova was a role she wanted to play. Two chapters in, she called her manager. “This is it,” she told him. “Grab it. Get it.” The film took years to reach the screen, and nothing about it feels hurried.

What Field brings to Tova isn’t simply sadness; it’s sadness that’s been managed, woven into routine so gradually it passes for a life. She lets you see both the dignity of that control and the cost of preserving it. She cleans the aquarium and tends to Marcellus, avoiding the full weight of her own loneliness, and telling herself that functioning is somehow the same thing as living a life.

For Newman, the emotional pull was immediate. Then came the challenge of adaptation. The novel moves among several parallel storylines—Cameron in California, Tova in Washington—and the film had to bring them together earlier without giving up the mystery. “Cameron and Tova’s storylines don’t completely [intersect] and start to affect one another until much later in the book, and we knew that early on,” Newman explained. But she also understood where the film’s heart lay. “The engine of the film had to be about this relationship between these two people.”

That meant tightening geography and timing while holding onto the book’s humor. Van Pelt’s story looks directly at grief and loss, but it finds room for comedy too, and Newman understood that. The film doesn’t treat grief as the enemy of joy; it lets both sit in the same frame.

Newman previously directed the literary adaptations Where the Crawdads Sing and The Last Thing He Told Me, but Remarkably Bright Creatures marks her first screenplay adaptation as a writer, and that closeness shows in how she spoke of the material. She has parents and close friends in their 80s, and the idea that two people at very different points in life could find each other in grief and help each other back toward joy had been true for her long before it became a film.

During production, the material became even more personal. Two family members died within months of each other, and five days before she began prep, her home was lost in California’s Eaton Fire in 2025. Working on this story helped Newman understand grief not as love’s opposite, but as one of its expressions—and connection as the thing that remains most valuable when so much else has been taken away.

Newman cast the voice of Marcellus late in the process, needing to see the full arc of the CGI octopus before she could hear him. She wanted warmth alongside the condescension, without the detached authority of a nature documentary. Marcellus couldn’t sound safely removed from the humans; he had to belong to their world, even while judging it.

Molina got the part, giving him and Field a peculiar, one-sided reunion. They worked together decades ago on the 1991 thriller Not Without My Daughter, and now they share a film without ever actually physically sharing a scene.

In practical terms, Marcellus often wasn’t there at all. Field acted opposite an empty tank, an imagined presence, and sometimes Connor doing her best Marcellus impression from inside the setup. But Field had lived with the story long enough to make the unseen feel present. “I knew him so well,” she said. “I could hear him, I could see him, I could feel him.” After a lifetime of acting, Field said, she had learned to trust that imagination. “He was there,” she said. So when people ask what it was like working with an octopus, her answer is simple: “I loved it.”

Connor helped determine how Marcellus would see the world. She built a custom lens attachment called “octo vision” to give the character his own point of view—not a dreamy wide shot, but a perspective with texture. “It needed to have a little bit of friction with the effect work,” Connor said. “It added a layer of humanity to this kind of characterization.” The rig had to fit inside an actual aquarium tank, which camera rigs generally do not do, so the crew improvised. There’s an aptness to that: an octopus who sees everything, captured through a lens built to move through an impossibly narrow space.

Pullman came to the audition without having read the book, which he now considers a blessing. “I would have been way too eager,” he said. “You would have smelled it on me.” Instead, the audition itself had a strange little spark to it: a cubicle transformed into an aquarium, Newman’s comic instincts shaping the rhythm.

He left thinking he’d love to make the movie, but even if he didn’t get it, the audition had been worth it. Then he read the novel and understood more fully why the material had stayed with him. “This is a story that I connected to so deeply,” Pullman said, partly because of its intergenerational bond and partly because of the way its mystery sneaks up on the reader. “It’s kind of like a camouflage mystery,” he explained. “It’s not beating it over your head, like, solve this, solve it. You get to kind of live with them and breathe with them.”

Cameron and Tova’s unlikely friendship gives the film its real subject: two people in different phases of life discovering that the distance between them is much smaller than it seems. They share little life experience, but loneliness doesn’t care much about age; neither does the need to be seen.

Field said some of her best moments with Pullman came from improvisation, with scenes shifting through production according to what felt true rather than what appeared on the page. That mutual trust seemed to extend even to one nerve-racking scene in which Pullman played the guitar for every single take. While he was modest about his abilities and insisted he didn’t really play the guitar, Field praised him. “I wish I couldn’t do that the way you couldn’t do that,” she told him onstage, to laughter.

That sense of awe had a history. Years before the audition, Pullman’s father, Bill Pullman, appeared opposite Field in a Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s three-act play All My Sons. Lewis saw it and was so undone that he couldn’t bring himself to go backstage afterward to greet her. “That play in particular was spectacular, and you two together were so phenomenal,” Pullman told Field, sitting close by. “It’s like a long recovery period for family members, because the mirage feels so close to true. I wouldn’t have known what to say even after that one.”

Van Pelt described watching a rough cut with none of the Marcellus effects yet rendered—only empty space where the octopus would eventually appear—and feeling moved anyway. When the finished version came, with Ritvo’s work complete, she said she genuinely couldn’t tell which footage showed the real aquarium octopus and which showed the digital one. Having spent enough time observing octopuses for research, she would know.

In the finished film, the illusion holds. Marcellus works not because he becomes a conventional sidekick, but because he sees the humans around him more clearly than they often see themselves. He’s watchful, sharp in his judgments and dry in his humor, yet more emotionally attuned than his condescension first suggests. If Tova has spent years avoiding what she can’t bear to say aloud, Marcellus becomes the unlikely witness who notices the life Tova has stopped letting in.

Tova’s grief and Marcellus’s tank aren’t the same, of course, but the film understands how easily an emotional enclosure can still feel like a home. The grief certainly doesn’t vanish; the past doesn’t loosen its hold all at once. But in Remarkably Bright Creatures, a woman, a young man, and a cephalopod with strong opinions help draw one another back toward the present—not suddenly healed, just back toward the business of living. Sometimes, that’s its own kind of miracle.

Remarkably Bright Creatures premieres Friday, May 8 on Netflix.