FILM | Feature
ROCKET MAN
Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón is in the running for an Oscar with his jaw-dropping space adventure Gravity. He speaks to James Mottram about a groundbreaking movie which was almost fi ve years in the making
S even years since Alfonso Cuarón’s last i lm, Children of Men, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Mexican i lmmaker had dropped off the face of the Earth. Which, in a way, he did. His latest i lm is Gravity, a mesmerising space drama that makes the technical challenges of Children of Men, with its sweeping takes through a futuristic London, look like child’s play.
‘I always take a little time between i lms,’ says the 51-year-old Cuarón, until now most famous for 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third (and arguably best) i lm adaptation of JK Rowling’s all-conquering series. ‘I thought that Gravity would be done in a year, year-and-a-half. But it took four-and-a- half years as we had to invent all the technology to do this i lm.’ Indeed, in a world where i lms are too often dubbed ‘groundbreaking’, Cuarón’s movie can genuinely lay claim to be. James Cameron, who knows a thing or two about sci-i , has already dubbed it ‘the best space i lm ever’; just the 3D alone – converted in post-production – far outstrips what Cameron achieved on Avatar, immersing the viewer into its thermospheric depths.
68 THE LIST 17 Oct–14 Nov 2013
Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded 375 miles above the Earth’s surface and i ghting for their lives, it’s Gravity’s efforts to replicate the physics of l oating in space that are truly breathtaking. ‘No i lm has been done like this and dei nitely not a whole i lm,’ says Cuarón, who seems certain to add to his previous Oscar nominations (for Children of Men and 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También) with his work here.
Just take the opening salvo – an unbroken 13 minute take as the camera effortlessly glides around Bullock’s rookie Dr Ryan Stone and Clooney’s veteran Matt Kowalski, as they go about their business repairing the Hubble Telescope. But it’s only when debris from an exploded Russian satellite heads in their direction, destroying everything in its wake, that Gravity grips you, with Stone and Kowalski cut adrift, their oxygen supplies dwindling. Written by Cuarón and his son Jonás, the director sees a theme of adversity as crucial to its story. ‘Everybody has adversities in life. Every day, you have little adversities. And on many occasions, you have big periods of adversities. What dei nes us is “what is the after- effect of the adversities?” And that was the point
of departure.’
With minimal dialogue, and just two principal characters, Gravity is as stripped-back as Hollywood gets. ‘We wanted to do a i lm where you rely on character,’ the director notes, ‘just to keep the tension.’ Curiously, while Bullock’s bullish turn recalls Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, Cuarón never really had the Alien franchise in mind. ‘The references we considered had nothing to do with space,’ he says, pointing to Spielberg’s Duel, and Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train, two i lms that deal, primitively, with humans versus technology. Cuarón, who is the son of a nuclear physicist, was obsessed with getting the details of space travel right. ‘We tried to be as accurate as possible, always honouring that it was a i ction and not pretending that this is a documentary.’ So much so, the visual effects animation team attended seminars held by scientists to better understand how objects move in zero-gravity. ‘Sometimes it was like just jumping into the void,’ Cuarón smiles, seemingly grateful to be back on terra i rma.
Gravity is on general release from Fri 8 Nov. See review, page 70.