Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron came up with what he thought was a simple idea for a compelling survival adventure in space five years ago.
Little did he know that Gravity would send him on a mission to invent a complex multimedia technique of filming weightlessness.
During the development, the director wondered, “What have I got myself into?”
“I have to say, every single day, I asked that question,” said the 51-year-old at a Toronto hotel with his Gravity star Sandra Bullock.
Apparently, the extra effort was worth the creative pain and suffering. After well-received preview screenings at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals, the movie is being touted as an Oscar contender.
In the 3D thriller, Bullock portrays Dr. Ryan Stone, who is on her inaugural space shuttle assignment. During Stone’s space walk with veteran astronaut and pilot Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney), space debris crashes into the shuttle, tearing apart the ship and killing everybody on board.
Both astronauts escape death, but end up drifting off course and out of communication with mission control in Houston as their oxygen supplies dwindle to dangerously low levels.
While the clock starts ticking, the veteran (Clooney) tries to persuade the rookie (Bullock) into focusing on what they need to do.
Cuaron, who co-wrote the script with his son Jonas, builds the suspense with assistance from Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, Steven Price’s musical score and Tim Webber’s visual effects.
Despite the technical demands, Cuaron was also invested in Bullock’s emoting and the story’s point of view.
“The film is about adversity, and we were going through adversities because everything was a big challenge. But that was the spirit of it,” said the director.
“When Sandra and I met for the first time, we talked about (adversity) in life. Our connection, before even talking creatively, was about life — a big understanding about big things in life.”
However, the director’s quest to discover new technologies proved to be just as intimidating as the philosophical themes of being lost in space.
“Well, it was not in a structured process,” Cuaron admitted. “It was more a process of trying to figure things out.”
“We tried to honour zero resistance, meaning that the characters would not only be floating but they would be spinning.
“We started developing technologies, not knowing if they were going to work but always keeping in mind that there was an actor who was going to perform the whole thing.”
In the end, Cuaron and his team came up with a hodgepodge of fancy artifices.
To that end, Oscar-winner Bullock had to endure wearing a space suit and helmet with a harness system made up of thin wires that spread across her and that were manipulated by puppeteers in order to mime zero gravity.
At other times, she was hooked up to a “light box” apparatus that simulated light in space from the sun and Earth.
The only consistent element in the process of both systems was the awkward and uncomfortable positions the actress found herself in.
“There was some blood and some blisters, but it just depends on these contraptions that literally took at least 20 minutes to get into,” Bullock said. “You were harnessed and locked into something that you had no control over once it started.”
Indeed, Cuaron would show Bullock an animated version of the sequence on a screen before filming with puppeteers who were required to co-ordinate movements of the space suit into appropriate positions.
“I had a little bit of leeway in the helmet, but my body had to match exactly what they were doing,” she said of the puppeteers.
Fortunately, by the time Bullock had arrived on set, Cuaron and his team had refined the weightlessness simulations.
“The truth of the matter is that Sandra trained so much and rehearsed so much that when we were shooting, we would rarely discuss technical aspects,” Cuaron noted.
“Sometimes I would say, ‘Can you reach a little higher?’ But most of the time, we were being preoccupied about performance and emotion.”
Most who know the Mexican director aren’t surprised that he pulled off the Gravity assignment with impressive results.
He has met difficult challenges head on before to a mostly enthusiastic response since making the transition to Hollywood from his Mexican film industry roots.
He captured the magic realism of the 1995 children’s fantasy The Little Princess. He re-modelled 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to glowing reviews. And he transferred the substance of the post-apocalyptic novel Children of Men onto the big screen in 2006 with winning results.
All of his films, he insisted, are grounded by the actors. And that includes his latest effort in creating new effects.
“Probably the longest shot in Gravity is Sandra inside a (space ship) capsule,” said Cuaron.
“From the moment in which she has lost faith and she goes to the other side of the light … that’s probably one of the film’s most achieved moments and it’s pure performance.”
From www.edmontonjournal.com