“On
where the idea for Gravity came from:
“In
a way, it was because of a script that Jonás had written which is actually a
film that he is prepping to direct. He showed it to me years ago and wanted
notes, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t have many notes, but I want you to help me
write a film like this.’ It’s a film that is very tight with only a few elements
and you’re in constant tension, but through that tension, you’re juggling
different things and subject matters. The movie he’s doing now takes place in
the desert and there’s only two characters, so we talked about the setting of
space because we thought it provided this metaphorical element that we wanted
to play with. We started talking, and pretty much the whole idea came to us in
one afternoon. We thought that if you have a character that’s drifting, getting
further and further away from earth—where life and human connection exists as
we know it. She lives in her own bubble. We wanted to do a film about
adversities, and the possible outcome is a rebirth, or new knowledge.”
On
making your ideas a cinematic reality:
“This
whole film was a big act of miscalculation, and that’s why the film took
four-and-a-half years to make. We thought it was going to be easy. When I
finish a film, the first thing I do is send it to Chivo—that’s Emmanuel
Lubezki, the cinematographer—and I said, ‘Chivo, look: this is a small movie,
two characters, we’re done in one year,’ and for the next four-and-a-half
years, he reminded me that I told him that. I knew that there was going to be
some visual effects but I thought with some rigs I’d be able to achieve it.
When we started to run the whole thing, it became very clear that the
technology to create the film didn’t exist, so we had to invent the
technology.”
On
the technology invented to create Gravity:
“The
problem with shooting the film is the combination of lack of gravity with long,
extended takes. We tried different things, like the Vomit Comet—the plane that
goes up and down—but that didn’t work. When you put actors in rigs you can feel
the strain, so you can only shoot for a little amount of time, plus you have
limitations because there are lots of wires around. For a big part of the
shoot, there was this 9’ x 9’ empty cube, and inside the cube’s walls were LED
screens. In the center of the cube there was a rig for the actor, and it was
very difficult to put the actor in, and the rig would balance in different
positions. What would happen is the actor would experience the point of view of
the character through the projections in the LED lights. That was important
because you cannot make actors go like this [spin around], so we had to keep
the actors more or less still, and we moved the camera and the lights around
them. Practical lights didn’t do the job so we used LED lights, because the
light just travels from screen-to-screen. The cube had a gap from which the
camera could see, and outside there was a long track with a robot—the ones they
use to build cars—and there was a camera on the robot going in-and-out and
up-and-down the track… It was like a ballet of technology going on. And outside
the cube, there were just rows and rows of geeks on computers.”
“Everything
was really painful for the actors, so I admire what Sandra and George did. It
was on the one hand painful, but also an exercise in abstraction, because they
were sometimes performing against nothing—just very specific marks. Sometimes,
the takes would be many minutes long, and they would have to memorize the
different marks with precise timing, because [the lights and animations] was
all pre-programmed. With Sandra, it was like a ballerina rehearsing cues for a
long time, so when we were shooting, she would just forget about all the cues
and just perform. I found it amazing what she did. She’s so precise… Sometimes,
Sandra was just performing a monologue that had a lot of technical
requirements. A lot of her scenes are very long and very laborious, and she’s
just talking and talking and it’s just one single shot.””
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