If you’ve ever felt so much as a passing appreciation of taxidermied owls and giant hot air balloons, The Aeronauts is for you. The Amazon Studios movie centers on real-life 19th century meteorologist and hot-air balloon enthusiast James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) and a fictional ballooner named Amelia Wren (played by his The Theory of Everything co-star Felicity Jones). Together, they decide to take a gas balloon up higher than anyone has gone before, breaking a world record and simultaneously getting some data needed for Glaisher’s studies into weather prediction. It’s basically a steampunk enthusiast’s (remember those?) ultimate fantasy.

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“I love that, on the one hand, it looks like a very stiff period drama, certainly with one character who is incredibly stiff,” Redmayne told VICE. “By the end, almost all the period trappings are gone and it’s just two people in a basket hurtling towards the earth in a survival movie.”

The Oscar-winning actor took a day off from filming Aaron Sorkin drama The Trial of the Chicago 7(expected to premiere Sept. 2020) to do what he called “gentle work” and talk about The Aeronauts (out Dec. 6)—a whimsical, spectacle-rich, semi-biographical adventure that pulls from Richard Holmes’ Falling Upward, a book detailing the early history of ballooning.