about the game and their adventure. Cast Josh Hutcherson as Walter Jonah Bobo as Danny Dax Shepard as Astronaut Kristen Stewart as Lisa Tim Robbins as Dad Frank Oz as the voice of Robot Additionally, John Alexander performed as the Robot, Derek Mears as Lead Zorgon, and Douglas Tait, Joe Bucaro, and Jeff Wolfe, portray individual Zorgons. Production Director Jon Favreau acknowledged the influence of other films saying Zathura had some bits like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Battle Beyond the Stars, and Superman. Favreau was aware of Dax Shepard from the TV series Punk'd but was convinced to cast him because Mike Judge put him in Idiocracy and because of his background in improvisation with The Groundlings that Will Ferrell had also come out of. Favreau preferred to use practical effects instead of computer generated imagery (CGI) in the film. He said, "it's so fun to actually shoot real spaceships or have a real robot running around on the set, or real Zorgons built by Stan Winston. It gives the actors, especially young actors, so much to work off of". Dax Shepard, who plays the astronaut, said he would not have been interested in doing the film if the effects had been CGI-based. Actress Kristen Stewart enjoyed the on-set effects, saying, "When we harpooned walls and ripped them out, we were really doing it. When there was a fire on set, there was really fire," and that "[t]he only green screen I was ever involved with was for getting sucked out into the black hole." The exteriors for the house were filmed at Oaklawn Avenue, South Pasadena. Miniature models were used to create the spaceships; Favreau enjoyed using techniques used in many earlier films, such as the Star Wars trilogy. in some shots the Zorgon ships were computer-generated, and in many of the scenes digital effects were used to create, for example, meteors and planets, and limbs for the robot suit built by Stan Winston Studios. CGI was used to augment the Zorgon suits, which were constructed so that the head came out of the front of the suit where the actor's chest was and the actor wore a blue screen hood over his own head, and to create an entirely computer-generated Zorgon for one scene. A full life size frozen model of Kristen Stewart was made by Stan Winston Studios. She described the process of modeling and being scanned