What if your adoptive parents weren't just from another country, but rather... another world? It's one of several intriguing plot points in director Jeffrey St. Jules' new film The Silent Planet, which is now available on digital. Lead actress Briana Middleton (The Inheritance) plays Niyya, a convicted felon who is sentenced to labor on another planet. It probably doesn't seem that absurd a penalty, given her parents are seemingly from another planet. Yes, Niyya was raised by aliens due to a long-ago tragedy that struck her actual parents' lives. MovieWeb recently spoke with both Middleton and St. Jules in separate interviews to learn more about how they put their heads together to better understand and flesh out the unique lead character — beyond just the words on St. Jules' script pages.

"A lot [of what we did] with her was talking about kind of how she grew up... and what it is about the alien culture that influences who she is," Jules told us about working with Middleton. "So a lot of just the discussions with her were about how [Niyya] views humanity and how she views the world. She has a real hatred for humanity because of what it did to her [biological] parents. But she is a human, so there's a real inner conflict within her — but kind of hating herself, hating the human parts of herself because humans are weak and they're vengeful, and they're all these things that the aliens are not. So yeah, for her, it was a lot of talking about who these aliens are and how that formed who [Niyya] is as a person."