“Hi, I’m James Gray. I’m the co-writer and director of ‘Ad Astra.’ We had thought for a while about what the moon might be like in the next 50 to 100 years and what it would take to settle the moon and how we probably wouldn’t be able to settle the moon in certain parts. So we tried to conceive of a sequence, which illustrated the chaos of what it might mean to adhere to treaties about certain parts you couldn’t go to the moon, and if that would mean lunar pirates. Probably, it would. And so we created an action scene around that concept. The goal for the scene was really twofold, I’ll say. One was to have it play as a very subjective experience— the strangeness of being on the moon to sell the kind of one-sixth gravitational pull, but also to illustrate what it means when there’s a total lack of order. And that was really the ambition.” “Roy?” “Yes, Colonel.” “Look at this, the big blue marble. It never ceases to amaze me.” “But it was really our attempt to extrapolate, to think about essentially what it would mean to settle territory and who gets to own what. And that has never resolved itself peacefully in the entire history of the human race. So why it would be different on the moon? We have no idea.” “Lieutenant, you clocking this?” “In an ordinary action sequence, the issues are how to shoot a stunt safely and superbly with a lot of impact. But this represented some very weird, difficult challenges, one of which was how to simulate one/sixth gravitational pull. Additionally, how to make sure that it looked like the moon. So my first idea, which of course is always wrong, was we’re going to shoot in the desert. And we will then figure out a way to color time the sky that’s blue, a jet black. And then we’ll take the color out of the sand, and we’ve got it. Well, what we wound up doing was shooting the sequence in the desert. And it presented huge and almost impossible logistical challenges. The first was, of course, well, the desert does have life. So all of the surfaces turned out to be useless. The second was that the sky, sometimes had clouds and sometimes had gradations. So even though we shot it in part with an infrared camera, which would turn the blue to black, it still didn’t turn it all the way black. So the sequence had to be almost like visual effects, heavily augmenting the practical stunts that we did. And then, of course, there was the attempt to simulate one-sixth gravity. And that was a lengthy trial where we experimented the different frame rates for the film. And ultimately, we decided between 32 and 36 frames per second as opposed to the usual 24 frames per second simulated for some reason what our experiences of what one-sixth gravity would look like. And may I say that the strange fact of the scene is that when we had to replace all of the surface and get rid of the desert, get rid of the vegetation, we found ourselves using the very high-quality Hasselblad photographs that were taken on the moon in the Apollo missions. With a computer. And you cut out around the wheels, and you cut around the shape of the Rover itself. And you replace the ground. And the replacement background was the photographs of the moon that were taken over a 20 to 30 year period. And so when they’re driving, what’s zooming past the wheels is a series of lunar photographs. And so the actual surface you’re seeing is the lunar surface.” [HEAVY BREATHING]