WEST COVINA, Calif.WEST COVINA, Calif. — Early in “A Million Miles Away,” young José Hernández adjusts the TV antenna as his migrant farmworker family gathers to watch the launch of Apollo 17 in 1972.
It’s that moment that Hernández, then 10, re as the point when his unlikely dream of becoming a NASA astronaut began. This new biopic about Hernández’s extraordinary life next shows the young José with holding an ear of corn like an imaginary spaceship outside his family’s Stockton home.
It’s a lovely piece of visual poetry, and like many perfect things, too good to be true.
The reality, as Hernández describes it in a recent interview with director and co-writer Alejandra Márquez Abella, is more earthbound, though perfect for a 10-year-old boy in that era.
“Ale took creative liberty with using the ear of corn,” Hernández says. “But my brother had a USS Enterprise model, and I would always get it from the closet where he hid it.
“I would play with it and I would get in so much trouble,” Hernández says of his attraction to his brother’s “Star Trek” toy. “He’d say, ‘You’re going to break the little antenna and point of it.’ But for practical purposes, it could have been an ear of corn.”
Hernández ultimately made it to space with NASA on a 2009 flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station.
“A Million Miles Away” arrives on Prime Video on Friday, Sept.15, with Michael Peña as the adult Hernández, Rosa Salazar as his wife Adela, and Julio Cesar Cedillo and Veronica Falcón as his parents Salvador and Julia.
The movie charts Hernández’s path from the farm fields of Central and Southern California to the stars. We meet the people who believed in him and helped him throughout his life — his second-grade teacher, his boss at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, his wife and extended family.
We see the frustrations — Hernández applied 11 times to NASA before he was accepted on the 12th try — and fears. Early in his career at NASA, Hernández saw friends and colleagues perish when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up in 2003 during reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere.
And ultimately, viewers witness Hernández make history as the United States’ first first-generation Mexican-American astronaut — he was born in French Camp, California in 1962 — and the first migrant farmworker to leave the fields for the stars.
In an interview edited for clarity and length, Hernández and the Mexican filmmaker Márquez Abella talked about his life, the movie, and the importance of family in making this dream come true.
Q: José, what’s this experience been like, to see your life portrayed on screen?
Hernández: It’s kind of surreal in the sense that when I first started this whole journey of becoming an astronaut, I promise you my goal was not to have a movie made about me. It was purely for selfish reasons. I wanted to go out in space. I wanted to be like astronaut Gene Cernan (on Apollo 17), the very last person to walk on the moon.
As soon as I got selected, I noticed a lot of attention was given to me because I was a former migrant farmworker that turned astronaut, and I guess it was a feel-good story. And I noticed I became an instant role model. I embraced it because I took it like a superpower. I said, ‘Hey, I can use this for good and inspire kids to reach their maximum potential. To dream big. After I left NASA, I started giving motivational talks and writing books. It’s after that that the studios came calling.
Q: And when the movie becomes available on Prime?
Hernández: I feel very lucky because it’s going to drop down onto Prime in over 240 countries and we’re going to motivate not the thousands I usually do every, the tens of thousands I do every year, but actually millions of people, thanks to Ale’s hard work.
Q: Alejandra, what made you want to tell José’s story? Were you familiar with it from when he went to space in 2009?
Márquez Abella: It was a story that was impossible to escape, because it’s just such an amazing story. I think the thing that captured me the most was the idea that it is not despite your origins that you become who you want to, it is because of them that you do.
Of course, I was familiar (with his space flight). But I never thought I was going to meet him. It was a major thing for me. It changed my life literally.
Q: The night of the Apollo 17 launch, and watching that on TV as a boy — that really planted the seed for you?
Hernández: Absolutely. The dream was conceived on that evening. Seeing that launch, every kid during that time wanted to be an astronaut, because it was all over the news. And I was just lucky that that desire, that burning feeling of, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do this!’ never went away. I just kept driving toward that goal and driving toward that goal.
Q: I want to ask both of you about one of the themes that runs through the movie. I really liked its portrayal of the role of family and the and strength they can provide.
Márquez Abella: I think it’s completely central to the film. I think that Hispanics have that sense of community in them. We are saying people should be more Latino, more Hispanic in that way. We should achieve things as a community and give thanks to those who help us achieve things.
I would go back to, We should give thanks to the people that put food on our table. That is a very important community, and it’s a very honorable thing to do. So I think it’s all connected.
Hernández: I was so happy that Ale portrayed that and showed that very clearly and succinctly in the movie. I sort of say let this be a lesson to everybody who has a goal in mind. Don’t be afraid to share what your dreams, your ambitions, your goals are with the people that you’re around. Because they’re the ones who are going to provide the most for you to be able to achieve this goal.
This is a classic case of, It takes a village. It’s everything from my wife helping me at pivotal points. The fact that my parents decided to stay in one place, heed the advice of Miss Young, my second-grade teacher. That the fact that my boss, knowing he would lose me as one of his employees, appointed me to that Russian job because he wanted to help me.
“So that’s why it’s important to share these things, because if I do not share that with them, they wouldn’t have been able to help my path towards my goal of becoming an astronaut.
