This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Back when you dreamed about being an astronaut, you imagined floating in space, looking back at Earth, and it was amazing. Not so much if you're not attached to a station or a ship and have no way to get back home. That's the situation writer-director Alfonso Cuarón created for Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in Gravity. The actors play a pair of astronauts whose shuttle explodes, leaving them tethered to each other and nothing else. Imagine the worst claustrophobia combined with the worst acrophobia and you'll get some sense of what's in store for them. Cuarón was responsible for more intimate fare, such as Children of Men, but wrote Gravity with his son, Jonás, who encouraged him to up his film-making stakes. The result was a four-year odyssey of research, animation, and CG innovation like nothing Cuarón had done before. He spoke to wired about weightlessness, Georges Méliès and silence.
Wired: Were you always interested in space?
Cuarón: I was eight when we landed on the Moon. I was so into the space programme as a kid. Eventually I realised it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early 70s was going to be an astronaut. But I also wanted to make movies. And there you go: I just finished a movie about astronauts.
It's almost like going to space.
I think I'd prefer to go to space. I will never do another space movie. I'm very proud of this; I loved every single second of the experience. But that's it. It took me four and a half years -- I'm ready to move on.
Why was it so hard?
We had to do the whole film as an animation first. We edited that animation, with sound, just to make sure the timing worked with the sound effects and music. Once we were happy with it, we had to do the lighting as well. Then all that animation translated to actual camera moves and positions for the lighting and actors.
We did a whole exploration of the screenplay; every moment; we made judgments about everything. Once shooting began, we were constrained by the limitations of that programming.
How so?
We shot space scenes in a sort of virtual-reality box that had the characters' environments projected on the walls. The actors had very little room to change their timing or their positions. Sandra Bullock trained like crazy to be able to be a part of all these technological challenges. Her background as a dancer helped a lot.
After all the training and all the rehearsals, she was able to just focus on the emotional aspect of her performance.
How long did it take altogether?
We animated for maybe two-and-a-half years before we started shooting the actors. Then we shot the film -- and then the poor animators had to start from scratch because they had to base their final animations on what was shot. Someone suggested we call Gravity animation, but I don't think we can because there's a fair amount of live action. And it was really hard work for the animators. After all, you learn how to draw based on two main elements: horizons and weight.
And you had neither.
It was a nightmare for them. They would make stuff and I'd say, "Yeah, but that looks like they're standing at a bar, not floating in space." We had a physicist explain the laws of zero gravity and zero resistance. After three months, the animators got the concept and it became second nature.
Beyond the laws of gravity, how did you decide how the movie's collisions and forces would play out in space?
We had experts in different fields come and lecture us. We had conversations with actual astronauts too, not only about our spatial questions but also about behavioural things in zero gravity.
Such as how astronauts feel and act in space?
Like how objects would react if the astronauts made specific movements. We were trying to honour reality and scientific accuracy as much as we could. It would be disingenuous to say we did it 100 per cent, because this is a movie, and we needed to take certain liberties -- but we tried to be accurate.
Can you give an example of a liberty?
Well, the story itself is... not unrealistic, but it's just not very probable that it would happen. And we had to embrace that from the get-go. It's not about trying to figure out what is accurate and what is not. I mean, there's no sound in space, but we use music to convey the story.
There was a loud explosion in the trailer.
Yes, but that's just the trailer. The only sound you hear in space in the film is if, say, one of the characters is using a drill. Sandra's character would hear the drill through the vibrations through her hand. But vibration doesn't transmit in space -- you can only hear what our characters are interacting with. I thought about keeping everything in silence. And then I realised I was just going to annoy the audience. While I'm sure there would be five people that would love nothingness, I want the film to be enjoyed by the entire audience.
How else did you ensure accuracy?
I didn't do fires, because there's no fire in space. At one point there's an explosion, and the only fire you see is the bit that was inside the shuttle and then extinguished.
What other space movies do you love?
There's certainly A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès, a silent film from 1902. But a lot of the films I like are more than fantasies -- they're movies fascinated by the technology of space exploration, and they try to honour the laws of physics. I watched the Gregory Peck movie Marooned over and over as a kid. There's another silent film by Fritz Lang called Woman in the Moon; it came out in 1929 and was already trying to be accurate about the technology needed to go into space.
Those directors couldn't speak to astronauts as you were able to.
Yes, they had to create space themselves. But after those is the daddy and mummy of every space movie, 2001. I doubt that will ever be surpassed. Also, Apollo 13 is such an accurate portrayal -- in many ways, I'm sure, even more accurate than Gravity -- of the technology of space exploration.
Apollo 13 made me feel as if I knew what actually happened.
There just aren't many films that focus on space the way it really is.
In all of your movies, from A Little Princess to Children of Men, there's an incredible intimacy between the characters. How did you create intimacy in space?
In Gravity, nearly everything is a metaphor for the main character. Character and background are equally important; one informs the other. Here, Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity. She's a character who lives in her own bubble, and in the film she's trapped in her space suit.
She's a character who has trouble communicating, and here she literally starts having communication problems. She's a character who needs to shed her skin to move on, and in the film she needs to get out of her astronaut suit because it's suffocating her. In the end, the story is about rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity.
After Gravity, what's next?
Any movie in which the characters walk on the floor.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
