Instead it fell to Webber and his company Framestore to devise a scheme to make it appear as though Bullock and Clooney were floating weightlessly hundreds of miles above the earth.Īlso read: George Clooney: ‘Gravity’ Is an Argument for 3D Most of the film unfolds in the cold vastness of space, so clearly a location shoot was out of the question. You come to the theory, and then you have to apply the theory, meaning to develop the technology.” “And after a while you realize, ‘Wow, how do we do it?’ And then it’s months and months of trying to figure out how. “You want to pretend this is going to be easy,” Cuaron told TheWrap. Recreating the look and the feel of zero gravity was no easy task, and Cuaron admitted that he conceived of his story of two astronauts who find themselves stranded in outer space before the technology existed to realize his outer-worldly visions. See photos: 10 of Sandra Bullock’s Biggest Box Office Bombs and Blockbusters I think that this will do something like that with space films certainly, but with science-fiction films in general.” “The first time I saw ‘The Matrix,’ I thought, well okay from here on out you can’t go back. “It’s elevated the bar so high,” Clooney said. Critics are comparing “Gravity” to last year’s “Life of Pi” and to films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which pushed technical achievement to new levels. Now that raves are poring in for the space thriller, it’s easy to forget the delays, mechanical frustrations and near injuries during its production. “There were days that were nerve-wracking.” “If this didn’t work, it would keep on going through Sandy,” Tim Webber, the film’s visual effects supervisor, told TheWrap. The device was intended to hurtle towards stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney before stopping as close as an inch from their faces, so precision was of utmost importance.Īlso read: Did ‘Gravity’ Really End as It Seemed? An Alternate Theory (Spoilers) Production got off to a rocky start on the first day of shooting when a special camera the crew had rigged up to a two-ton robot broke down.
Alfonso Cuaron’s pioneering “Gravity” faced enormous special-effects hurdles before it could achieve lift off.įilming stretched over four and a half years, forcing Warner Bros.