Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity took the world by storm for its technological achievement as well as its deep exploration of humans’ tendency to get through adversity. The sci-fi survival thriller won seven Academy Awards including Best Director for Cuarón, and Best Cinematographer for Emmanuel Lubezki.
Lead actress Sandra Bullock was universally appreciated for her almost one-woman performance in the film and was nominated for Best Actress at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes. Bullock was paired with George Clooney in the film who makes a few appearances during the film. However, the first choice for his role as Lieutenant Matt Kowalski was MCU star Robert Downey Jr.
Sandra Bullock Had A Difficult Time Filming Gravity
Actress Sandra Bullock has given her share of incredible and difficult performances, but reportedly none were as testing as the shoot of Gravity. Shooting for the film, which would be set in space and would feature at most two actors was a long and arduous task for the team as they figured out how to visually capture the character’s state of mind.
Director Alfonso Cuarón reportedly got the idea of filming the parts of the actors in a capsule while attending a music concert. The actors would be placed in a cube that was fitted with LED screens that would match the lighting of the virtual environment in which they would be. Bullock and George Clooney were also attached to a harness and a robotic arm that could emulate the spinning movements of the space shuttle.
Sandra Bullock spoke about the process to The Guardian, and told how she felt that her shooting conditions were similar to the loneliness of being in space with no communication,
“My situation was somewhat like the situation the character was in. There’s no one around, you’re frustrated, nothing works, you’re in pain, you’re lonely, you want someone to fix everything for you but they can’t – all those things I was feeling.”
Apart from the hours of being attached to a robotic arm in a brightly lit capsule, Bullock also had to move in precisely choreographed ways to get the performance right for the CGI environment she would be placed in later. The experience reportedly frustrated her as there would sometimes be takes that were almost right except for one particular movement. Since the film had many long takes, she would have to do the scene all over again. She said,
“You thought you’d executed it properly then you’d hear ‘Sandy …’ in the earpiece, and either Alfonso or Tim would say: ‘At 16.5 seconds, your hand was three inches too far forward, it needs to come back.’ Literally, if you were one inch out of place you had to start over. If you were two seconds too long in the scene, you had to start over. It was so angering and nerve-racking, but you just kept doing it till you got it right.”
The entire filmmaking process including the post-production took the team a little over three years to complete.
Why Did Robert Downey Jr. Walk Out Of Gravity?
Despite the tough and rigorous shooting conditions of Gravity, actors Sandra Bullock and George Clooney got it right and gave incredible performances that form the heart and soul of the film, with Bullock especially receiving heaps of praise. She was nominated for both the Oscars and the Golden Globes while winning the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards for Best Actress in an Action Movie. While Clooney too gave a short but effective performance in the film, he was not the first choice to play the character.
While talking on The Howard Stern Show, actor Robert Downey Jr. spoke about being approached for Gravity and then his decision to exit the film. Downey Jr. stated the same conditions that Bullock and Clooney went through as the reason for walking out of the project. He said,
“I went to do a test with a new sort of multi-spherical camera thing they were [using] for how they were going to do all the CGI. And I’m one of those guys who can be comfortably uncomfortable pretty easily…but I went in the morning to do that, and we did it for about twenty minutes, and I said, ‘This is crazy. How much longer?’ And they said, ‘It’s like another two to four hours,’ and I said, ‘No, it isn’t!’ “
Robert Downey Jr. is no stranger to CGI-heavy spectacles and has had his career renaissance as Iron Man in the VFX bonanza that is the MCU. However, even he reportedly found the filming of Gravity to be arduous enough to exit the film.
Source: The Guardian, The Howard Stern Show
