GUTIERREZ: We called our motion control system the Cruciflex, because that’s sort of how we felt about it. It controlled camera movements with a computer so that a camera could precisely repeat movements. It featured a Fries Mitchell 35-mm camera mounted on a boom arm, placed at right angles to a vertical shaft. The mechanical system moved a camera along the x, y, and z axes. It allowed it to move in multiple directions. The cross-shaped configuration was in turn positioned on a moving turntable, which enabled the whole apparatus to swing around as it traveled down the track. The Cruciflex allowed the camera to pan 360 degrees, roll 360 degrees three times, and pitch approximately 200 degrees. You could shoot one element—say, the X-1—in front of a blue screen and the camera would travel toward the model, giving the impression that the X-1 was moving toward the camera.

PHILIP KAUFMAN: We discovered that the motion control effects George was doing on Star Wars didn't create the grittier effect we wanted.

CALEB DESCHANEL: Getting to outer space can be violent.

GUTIERREZ: “Make it like they did in the old days” became our marching orders. So I opened the window and had my director of photography go stand downstairs with his back to the wall and a handheld camera looking up toward the sky. On the street, crew people were holding a large parachute to catch the plane that I was going to throw out the window. Our model of the X-1 was 4 and a half feet long and cost $6,000. The model makers were holding their breath. The next day we showed Phil the footage and he loved it.

CALEB DESCHANEL: We used rear projection on the scenes where Yeager was trying to break the sound barrier. Phil used footage from an experimental filmmaker, Jordan Belson, who created images of moving lights that streak by you to give a representation of what it was like to get to that point just beyond something that anybody had ever done before.

PETER KAUFMAN: Belson worked in a little apartment in San Francisco. I don’t think anyone from the production went in. He did all of his effects in a little light box with smoke. He’d bring his footage in. We’d all be amazed.

GUTIERREZ: We did various kinds of shaky-cam movement to give it a sense of urgency. We attached a vibrator to the lens or a power drill to the camera mount to make it all move like crazy.

CALEB DESCHANEL: At one point I shook the camera so hard, I gave my operator a black eye.

RANDY THOM (SOUND RERECORDING MIXER): I went to Twentynine Palms Marine base to record the sound of a bomb detonating for the plane crashes. There was a test range where planes would drop bombs. Occasionally one of them wouldn’t explode. So there was this ordnance team that would defuse the bomb or explode it. I had to sign several reams of paper saying my family wouldn’t sue if I got hurt.

SHEPARD: We had a model of the X-1 in the hangar. We had these rigs that shook the hell out of us. It wasn't a simulator. It was much more primitive. It was like a milk shake apparatus.

CALEB DESCHANEL: When Yeager goes up to break the sound barrier, you look down and you see the desert beneath; we had giant sheets of butcher paper with desert scenes painted on them and somebody was pulling the paper very slowly underneath the model so it would feel like you were at 20,000 feet with the Earth moving below.

GUTIERREZ: There were some pyrotechnicians creating clouds on the ground. They had a PT boat camouflage fogger on the back of a truck. We used vaporized mineral oil to create 150-foot-high clouds on the ground. You could shut a freeway with those.

CHARTOFF: Today it would be CGI.

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CALEB DESCHANEL: There were these wonderful guys who built these models that were really beautifully detailed. These guys loved their planes. At one point when the guy was flying the X-1, he landed it too hard. It burst into pieces. He was a burly guy who had built this thing. He went over to it and picked it up. He was in tears.

KIRKLAND: The B-29 we had was the only one left in the country. It belonged to the Confederate Air Force.

THOM: I was driven out in the middle of a desert. The jeep stopped at a certain point and I stood there on a little knoll, and a hundred yards away this guy was working on something. I walked 50 yards closer, nervous. I didn’t want to surprise the guy—he was sitting on a bomb like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. He yelled to me, “Son, if I was you, I’d either come over here where I am, or I’d get another 100 yards away. Because this thing might go off. And if it does go off, it could kill ya. But if it doesn’t kill ya, you’d probably wish it had.” We marched about 100 yards away and got down behind a hill. He detonated and I recorded.

GUTIERREZ: Some of the reentry shots of the Mercury capsule, the close-ups, were shot on a stage with a 4-foot-tall model.

HARRIS: I knew that capsule inside and out. I knew what all the gauges were and everything. You’re just using your imagination. Like a kid, you know, climbing under a bunch of blankets pretending you’re going to the moon.

KIRKLAND: We shot the sequence where Gus Grissom bails from his capsule in Half Moon Bay, within sight of Mavericks.

PHILIP KAUFMAN: The question was, and is, did Grissom blow the hatch and screw the pooch, putting himself in danger, or did it go off like he claimed? I would like to believe it went off accidentally.

KIRKLAND: You think of the Pacific as being calm, but it can be ugly. We had barges anchored 15 times to Christmas, but they still moved. We needed to be able to submerge the capsule and bring it back up to do another shot. We couldn’t put it on a crane because you’d see the crane. We installed pipes underneath—you’d take the air out and it would sink, and then you’d put the air in and it would resurface.

WARD: I had a wet suit on under my flight suit, in pretty cold water. And then they picked me up, dangling by a rescue noose. It’s a tragic scene. You see Gus Grissom hanging there: almost totally defeated, like a dead fish on the end of a line, and then coming up toward the whirling helicopter blades, being pulled in.

PHILIP KAUFMAN: It was very dangerous. What a testament to Fred. Fred almost died in the water.

WARD: Grissom actually died in a prelaunch test. I heard the recording of the incident.

PHILIP KAUFMAN: Gus was a fucking hero.