Innerspace director Joe Dante
Innerspace is a 1987 American science fiction comedy film directed by Joe Dante and produced by Michael Finnell. Steven Spielberg served as executive producer. It was inspired by the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage. It stars Dennis Quaid, Martin Short and Meg Ryan, with Robert Picardo and Kevin McCarthy, with music composed by Jerry Goldsmith. It earned $25.9 million in worldwide theatrical rentals and won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, the only film directed by Dante to do so.Cast
In addition, the film's director, Joe Dante, has an uncredited cameo as a Vectorscope employee, while Short's  SCTV cast mates Joe Flaherty and Andrea Martin have cameos as waiting room patients. Chuck Jones appears briefly as a grocery shopper in one scene.Production
The film began as an original script by Chip Proser, who called it "basically a rip off of Fantastic Voyage. My idea was that the big guy was up and moving around and could react to what was going on inside." The script was optioned by Peter Guber at Warner Bros. in 1984. Guber offered the script to Joe Dante who turned it down. Guber then had the script rewritten by Jeffrey Boam as a comedy. Boam says "The idea was kind of ridiculous, which was a person miniaturized and put into someone else's body. That's all I kept from the original script. They originally thought it might be Michael J. Fox inside Arnold Schwarzenegger's body. I actually kept turning it down, and they were persistent and kept coming back to me."According to Dante, Boam "approached it ... from the concept of what would happen if we shrank Dean Martin down and injected him inside Jerry Lewis." Dante says that Steven Spielberg had become involved on the project as an executive producer and he may have been responsible for the comedy. "It was such a goofy idea that there were no limits to it," said Boam. "I felt I could do anything, and so the script I wrote was very loony and far out there but everybody loved it. Dick Donner, Joe Dante, John Carpenter and even Steven Spielberg wanted to do it. So when Steven wanted to do it, Warners thought I was a God and any amount of money it would take to do the movie they would spend. Steve ultimately decided he only wanted to produce so Joe came along and really latched on to the idea."Quaid's role was originally envisioned to be played by an older actor but then they decided to make the character younger. Dante recalled during filming scenes where Quaid and Short's characters interacted, "Dennis would be on the set in a booth, so the interaction was really happening. Dennis would hew to the script a little more than Marty. After you got a scene in the can, he'd beg for more takes, in the voice of Katharine Hepburn, which was hard to resist."Dante says Spielberg would "protect you from the studio and sometimes from the other producers. It was a very filmmaker-friendly atmosphere over there [at Amblin]. You got all the best equipment and all the best people and all the toys you wanted to play with. Plus you had somebody on your side who was also a filmmaker and they knew exactly what you were talking about when you had a problem or you had a question.""It's a dumb, stupid comedy, which is exactly what people need in the summertime," said Quaid. "It's very idiotic and I love it. We encounter every dumb, stupid cliché in the book. Leave your brain at home and you'll have a good time."Meg Ryan met Quaid on set and they later married.
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