Time & Perspective Quote by Lukas Haas

There is a sly humility in Haas calling a film crew "Martians in Kansas": it flips the usual Hollywood power fantasy into something closer to social awkwardness. He is describing that peculiar on-location paradox where a production feels both enormous and fragile. Enormous because trucks, lights, schedules, and strangers with walkie-talkies can dominate the rhythms of a small town. Fragile because the crew is also exposed, constantly watched, unmistakably out of place.

The line works because it frames the takeover as accidental rather than imperial. "It felt like" softens the claim, suggesting self-awareness about how it might look from the outside. Yet the image still lands: a month is long enough for the novelty to curdle into disruption, for locals to recalibrate their daily lives around call times and blocked-off streets. "We worked most of the time" hints at the grind behind the glamour, but also at the tunnel vision that makes outsiders forget they are guests.

"Martians" is doing cultural work. It nods to Midwestern stereotypes - steady, communal, grounded - while admitting that film people arrive with alien rituals: strange hours, artificial light, manufactured emotion. Haas is essentially narrating a collision between two economies of attention: a town built on continuity and a production built on controlled chaos. The subtext is a quiet ethical question: when art needs a place, what does it take from that place, even temporarily?