Back when you dreamed about being an astronaut, you imagined floating in space, looking back at Earth, and it sounded 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 October’s Gravity. The actors play a pair of astronauts whose shuttle explodes, leaving them tethered to each other — and nothing else. Imagine the worst claustrophobia you’ve ever had combined with the worst acrophobia and you’ll start to get some sense of what’s in store for them. While Cuarón made his mark with intimate movies like Children of Men and Y Tu Mamá También, he wrote Gravity with his son, Jonás, who encouraged his dad to up the stakes. The result was a four-and-a-half-year odyssey of research, animation, and CG innovation like nothing Cuarón had done before. The writer-director spoke to us about microgravity, Méliès, and the magic of silence. After all, in space, no one can hear you scream, “Action!” Were you always interested in space? I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually I realized 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, even with sound, just to make sure the timing worked with the sound effects and music. And once we were happy with it, we had to do the lighting in the animation 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 single moment; we made judgments about everything. Once we began shooting, 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. But we adapted. Sandra Bullock trained like crazy to be able to be a part of all these technological challenges. It was choreography for her. I think her background as a dancer helped a lot. It was so much by numbers. 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 two, 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 just 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! “I will never do another space movie. It took me four and a half years—I’m ready to move on.”

Exactly. They had neither of those things, poor guys. 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 really got the concept and it started to become second nature. You could always identify the new animator on the block because he’d be the guy having panic attacks and a nervous breakdown, wanting to quit. Beyond the laws of gravity, how did you determine how the collisions and forces in the movie would play out in space? We had experts in different fields come and lecture us. Some talked about very specific things, like tethers. We had conversations with actual astronauts too, not only about our spatial questions but also about behavioral things in zero gravity. Well, not zero gravity; in research-speak, it’s “microgravity.” You mean like how astronauts feel and act in space? Like how objects would react if the astronauts made specific movements. We were trying to honor reality and scientific accuracy as much as we could. I mean, it would be disingenuous to say we did it 100 percent, because this is a movie, and we needed to take certain liberties—but within the frame of those liberties, we tried to be very accurate. What’s an example of a liberty you had to take? Well, the story itself is … not unrealistic, but it’s just not very probable that it would happen, you know? And we had to embrace that from the get-go. But I want audiences to embrace the universe. It’s not about trying to figure out what is accurate and what is not. I mean, there’s no sound in space, for instance, but we use music to convey the story. There was also a loud explosion in the trailer. Yes, but that’s just the trailer. I honor silence. 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 itself doesn’t transmit in space—you can only hear what our characters are interacting with. I thought about keeping everything in absolute silence. And then I realized I was just going to annoy the audience. I knew we needed music to convey a certain energy, and while I’m sure there would be five people that would love nothingness, I want the film to be enjoyed by the entire audience. What other steps did you take to ensure accuracy? Besides no sound, 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. Are there any space movies that you’ve loved? 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 honor the laws of physics. I watched the Gregory Peck movie Marooned over and over when I was a kid. There’s another silent film by Fritz Lang, Woman in the Moon; it came out in 1929 and was already trying to be very accurate about the technology needed to go into space.

“Nearly everything is a metaphor for Sandra Bullock’s character. She lives in her own bubble—she needs to shed her skin to move on.” But those directors couldn’t speak to astronauts like you were able to. Yes, they had to create space themselves. But after those is the daddy and mommy 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 about the technology of space exploration. Apollo 13 made me feel as if I knew what actually happened in space. There just aren’t that many films that focus on space exploration the way it really is.

In all of your movies, from A Little Princess to Children of Men—no matter the backdrop—there’s an incredible intimacy between the characters. How did you create intimacy in the vastness of space? In Gravity nearly everything is a metaphor for the main character. The way I tend to approach a film is that 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. Children of Men had an amazing tracking shot, and Gravity begins with a 15-minute opening shot. What’s the appeal of the long take for you? The reason I like tracking shots has to do more with a sense of real time than anything else. In Gravity the use of tracking — of long extended takes — was partially because we wanted to film it like an Imax-style Discovery Channel documentary. You don’t have the luxury of cuts when you’re in space. The camera is there; you’re just observing. And isn’t it amazing how Earth looks from out there? Sure, as long as you’re not floating away without a tether. After almost five years working on Gravity, what’s next? Any movie in which the characters walk on the floor.



