Sandra Bullock, Alfonso Cuaron and Son Talk GRAVITY
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- Category: Coming Soon
- Published: Thursday, 26 September 2013 07:27
- Written by Lupe Haas
Alfonso Cuaron’s son influenced the idea for GRAVITY starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. The film’s star, director and Cuaron’s son Jonas discuss how the unique project came to be and why its causing quite a buzz for award season.
Q: In most depiction's of space we have a sense of up, down, and you effectually do away with that with your depiction of space. Can you talk about what kind of changes you had to make in your way of thinking to convey the physics of space properly?
AC: That was the biggest challenge since early on. Even getting before the technical solutions when we were considering the choreography, I would bring things from the standpoint of gravity of horizon and weight. It was so weird..actually it was a whole learning curb because it was completely counterintuitive. The way you start choreographing is pretty much with ??? meaning animations. The problem is that graph people, people that draw animation, animators begin to learn how to draw based on horizon and weight and it was a big big learning curb with experts coming to explain the physics of synergy and what would happen. You could tell who was the new animator in the room because it was the guy who was completely stressed out and wanted to quit. Eventually it starts to get like second nature but it was a tough one.
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Q: For Sandra, Can you talk a little bit about what you had to do training-wise? Was it a different type of training, with the spinning, it just was amazing! And also, I know you did this with a green screen and when you first saw it, the very first time, what was your reaction the film?
SB: Well if there had been a green screen it would have been nice. There was just blackness or bright white lights or metallic objects. Basically, it was what Alfonso said: you had to retrain your body from the neck down to react and move as if it was in Zero G without the benefit of Zero G moving your body, because everything that your body reacts to with a push or a pull on the ground is completely different than it is in Zero G, so to make that second nature just took training and just weeks of repetition and then syncing it with Alfonzo’s camera and the mechanics and the mathematics of it all…and then just separating that from your head where you had to sort of connect to the emotion and tell the emotional story. So there were various contraptions that existed on the soundstages which were, when I first saw them, you just made them your friend as quickly and as physically as you could because if you didn’t- they were so confusing and complex, you had to figure out how to communicate in a language that you’re not understanding coming at you and it didn’t make sense with my rhythms and then going back going “that doesn’t make sense, can we musically do this so then rhythmically I will know” so it was just such a collaborative experience.AC: Yes but you where very involved from early on not only in the animation but with blocking and with staging and with making sure because everything was going to be pre-programed but what was amazing is that you would go with your training people, conversations with the reefs and the stones and say what is it exactly what I have to bring forth in your body in order to hold this thing. But also with the previs (not sure what he's saying) with the animations, also with this motion if I'm going to keep my arm holding like this and floating, how much strength...it was very specific the work out you were doing.
SB: It’s just core strength. From a dancer’s perspective, just making sure you weren’t going to hurt your body, you could be very agile and flexible, to maintain your body in a rig that’s load bearing, the load is your weight, for long hours of time. And then there was going to be tweaks and things like that.
Q: What was your reaction when you first saw it put together?
SB: The first time I saw it all put together was in Venice, and it was just I always say an actor, when they see themselves for the first time, you spend all your time just watching yourself and hating yourself and picking your performance apart, saying “I look horrible, I should quit..”,. There was no time to pick apart one’s performance because you were inundated with the extreme beauty and emotion that he created visually, and I hate using the world technologically because it sounds like it’s an inanimate object, we always go to things like this you know, technology is something that’s heady. It was turned into such an emotion and such a visceral, physical experience in this movie. I don’t know if you saw it, but you just went “I don’t know how they did it with sound, coming here behind your head”, all of a sudden you found yourself affected in ways you were not planning on being affected. So we had that same reaction, I think George and I both did, we went "Wow.” I mean you can’t really speak after the film is over. So I think I was lucky enough in my work, career to finally be able to view a movie I was in as it was supposed to be viewed as it was supposed to be viewed, as a newcomer.Win GRAVITY Movie Tickets: Guaranteed Seating
Q: Alfonso can you talk about some of the challenges you had to face regarded sound, visual design, and the atmosphere ands the story telling?
AC: All of those are the tools for the same thing, are tools to convey the emotional journey. Each one of those things on their own are meaningless, they can be cool but they don't convey the emotion you want to do. Everything is working in function of that. The script in many ways was very solid in terms of structure. From the moment we finished the first draft we knew nothing changed in term of each one of the moments, each one of the set pieces. What changed quite a lot was the involvement of Sandra and George. It was this clarity about this emotional journey how we were going to convey those emotions. In many ways that was the big hanger in which all these other elements start to hang from that floor. It was very strange as technological as this film sounds it was a big collaboration between artist at the end because they worked with the visual effects supervisor is an artist in some right. Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer is an artist in some right and everyone was trying to make life easy to the other part knowing that the essence of this was that emotional core that happened with the collaboration of the actors. So all those other elements were falling into that. Historically there's a fight with sound designers and composers, you see them in the mixing room and they're always fighting because the composer wants the music to be hear and sound wants the sounds to be heard and here they were working together on all of this stuff. That started early on with the selections of moods and music that Sandra started to have each one in the scenes when she was performing. It was a very holistic process in many ways.
Q: This had to be an emotionally grueling role for you, you were amazing. So I was wondering if there something you’ve learned about yourself that you’ve taken with you from this experience?
SB: Hmmm, oh I’m sure, I mean you never quite know what the change is until one day you wake up, you go “Wow, I’m reacting to things differently, I feel differently…I mean I’ve always said, the experience of meeting an artist that you are in awe of that you hope to create with one day is usually disappointing, ‘cause you put them up on a pedestal and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s not a nice person.’ But the exact opposite was true in the meeting with Alfonso in that I got to meet a human being whose evolution as a human being, it was just so bright…
AC:You mean being like Beans?
SB: What did I say oh, Be-ing. If you can’t understand Alfonso, I’m more then happy to translate. I know it’s difficult, you speaking English when he’s answering your questions…Oh it’s from last night, isn’t it. You know, I knew that we were on sort of similar, I don’t know, evolu I don’t know, similar paths in life and how we looked at things and events and the unknown, we didn’t know why we were there we were just sort of going ‘OK, how do you deal with that?’ and then, then we went into the technological side and we went ‘Wow, I don’t know how I’m gonna pull this off’ and I met Jonas and I saw, ‘Wow, his son, his co-writer, is exactly the same,’ there’s a sense of calm and understanding that always went back to the emotion of the story. And then you meet the producer, and you’re like ‘Oh here comes the person you’re going to hate’, and there were times he would come to the trailer at the end of the day and I knew why he was coming that I did not like him at all, but…all of our priorities were the same in that we were all stepping into a completely unknown world. They had been in it far longer then I was, I had to play catch up, and the important thing for me was, I can’t selfishly take journeys any more because I have to take a little boy along with me, and I said ‘If you make it an amazing experience for him and make him…make it so that I’m not somewhere not paying attention’, because I’m so worried about where is he, is he having fun, is this a good life experience…and David turned a back lot of a soundstage in rainy London into a wonderland for a 1 ½ year old. Everything was bumper-guarded, everything. People go ‘What is that?’ and I go ‘ That is to protect a Child’s head, all of it’. So it was just, we can go through the technical aspects of working and how you change, but there was just a level of kindness and collaboration and I think the general sense of the unknown bonded everyone together in such a human level. It was just…if you have an experience it spoils you, it ruins it for a lot of other people, and I can that honestly happened.
Q: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the research you did for the film, people at NASA that you talked to, and how that sort of helped you understand this character, what she’s going through, as well as what it’s like to be the only actress on screen and sort of as an actress perform for a great deal of the movie by yourself?
SB: I’ll answer the latter question first. I’ve never thought about that. I never thought about, “I’m the only person on screen.” I thought, you know you had the story, the elements that Jonas and Alfonso wrote, the technology was a constant character around you, how were the visuals…I always went back to ‘What was in their heads that I need to honor and help execute,’ so I never once thought ‘I’m the only person’ because there’s George, who’s a vital part of this film who represents Life and this outlook on living that if you don’t have that, this film couldn’t exist. So I never thought about that until I started doing press, and now everybody’s freaking me out going ‘How do you feel that this rests on..’ and I’m going ‘How is this now my problem? I didn’t write this or produce it or come up with the cockamamie idea to make a space movie, but I still don’t think about ‘cause I think I’m third or fourth on the list before the story, the emotional visuals, the sounds, the experience of what they’ve created. Research! We had a lot of technicians around us that helped me literally with knowing where buttons were in the Shints and the Soyu’s, what would I do, is this the correct…I was more concerned with body work and how it worked in Zero G and there’s no one to ask, because you have people explaining, ‘Well this is what happens,’ and I go, ‘ I just, it’s not registering.’ And My brother in law, a friend of his has a wine packaging place, and the guy says, ‘Yeah, my sister’s an astronaut.’ And my brother in law said, ‘Well, my sister in law’s getting ready to be an astronaut.’ So he got my number to Katie, who was at the ISS at the time, and she called and I was able to literally ask someone whose experiencing the things that I was trying to physically learn, and was able to ask her how the body works, and what do you do, and what do I need to reteach my body physically to do that cannot happen on earth that we need to get the puppeteers and everyone together on the same page so we’re all…as Alfonso says, ‘We think this way…on earth. You have to think…’…I mean it’s just the oddest thing to reprogram your reactions, so it was just a really coincidental, fortuitous thing that happened over wine that got me the final piece of information that I needed…and that was it.
Q: Sandra, just kind of picking up on that, in your conversations with Katie, what fascinated you about her job, which is one that may be even cooler than yours? Fascinated you about the experiences she had?
SB: We had one phone conversation. Apparently, they aren’t allowed to accept calls whenever you feel like calling them, and our work schedule was so crazy. Our connection was always, sort of, ships passing in the night. My character wasn’t an astronaut. My character wanted or aspired to be an astronaut. All those questions are for George. That’s the research he had to do. My character was just someone who happened to be in a position where it was easier to train her to execute this one mission and then go home. What I did learn from them, which is so beautiful, which again applies to George, is just their emotional point of view on life. And why they go up there… Why they specialize in something on earth and why they want to go to space, to see how it operates in space, so we all benefit from it when they get back. That’s more of a George question.
Q: Alfonso what was your experience with the NASA astronauts and how did that help inform what you were trying to accomplish?
AC: Well it was very humbling because you can write a whole fiction and your talking to people who has done that in real life so obviously there was a certain something that informed the script. In an early draft we had scenes that,,as we were talking to one astronaut we that was completely moronic it was stuff that could never happen and even if this film is not a documentary, it's a fiction we wanted that frame of fiction to make it plausible and accurate was we could Definitely the physics of space we tried to be super accurate. There's so many technical aspects in terms of orbits and trajectories and a lot of physics that are involved in traveling in space...we had to take our leaps in terms of fiction. Your also talking to those people so you don't care about your movie anymore. You want to heat what they have gone through, you want all the detail. In real life they have hundreds of alternative procedures of each thing that happens. In 40 years of space exploration there's only been a handful of incidents. There are missions all the time and you're going to the most hostile place that any human has been ever and it's because these people are so well trained. They're not trained to just do what they're suppose to do they have to have alternative thinking of many other procedures so these people are really remarkable. That's something that I admire in the space program, it's a bunch of people that is so qualified then you just feel stupid, you feel like a movie director.
Q: I heard you were inspired to write gravity after reading your sons script Desierto about two immigrants stranded in the desert. How is it working with your dad and you with your son? And Sandra Bullock had a little Spanish line in the film was that something Alfonso you threw in as an homage to your Mexican heritage or is that something Sandra just improvised?
AC: What do you think?
SB: He loves Mexico.
AC: That line was actually pretty funny because it used to be I don't speak chinese so she said no hable chino. But yeah when Jonas gave me Desierto, I read Desierto to give him notes then I said well I don't have that many notes but I want you to help me write something like that. What I mean something like that I, to write something that you're on the edge of your seat that is really tense and suspenseful, he called it a roller-coaster ride but at the same time it's a deep intense emotional ride and interweave between the two of those is magic elements which are told through visual metaphors. I asked him to please do something like that.
Jonas Curon: Working with him was a great experience because we had this conversation about doing a movie in this style. It is a big challenge on one hand to have the non-stop action element and to be able to juggle themes. I think the biggest challenge was to engage the audience on an emotional levels, that really never came to happen until we started working with George and Sandra. I learned a lot from my dad and also from George and Sandra. When I really figured out how a character can come to life...it was a huge gamble because the whole, movie was on this characters shoulders. On screen she managed to really engage the audience.
AC: The experience was really two writers working together.
SB: If I could also say about Jonas, there is a complimentary piece, a film piece that he did. If you saw the film there is a moment where I'm speaking to earth and the characters name is Aygon and he's an Inuit.He went there and shot this absolutely beautiful complimentary piece of loneliness and emptiness on earth where this man is calling from. It's so beautiful I get bumps just thinking about it and you'll hopefully get to see it. Again apple, tree, the talent is overwhelming it's a beautiful, beautiful piece and compliments what happens in the film, so we get a little gift later on. It's beautiful.
Q: Sandra, you had to go to some pretty dark place as a mom in this role, is that difficult for you to film?
SB: Oh yeah. No one wants to think about that. I just kept thinking “What a strange job.” I mean, who is young and goes “I want to do this for a living.” But yeah… If I personally can’t feel it, I can’t do it. I kept having to say, in the beginning, “What would I do” and I realized I might be far worse off than she is. So, you just have to go there and know that at the end of the day you can unplug. And you can go home and do something that a lot of parents can’t.
Q: Sandra, I don’t know anybody who hasn’t come out of this and said what a great movie this is. But one of the great surprises is that it’s so unexpected to see you in this kind of a role. I wondered what was your reaction when you got offered it and looked at it the first time.
SB: Yeah. I’ve always longing to do emotionally and physically, what my male counterparts always got to do. I just felt envious, every time I saw a movie that I was in awe of and it was usually a male lead. Those kind of roles weren’t available. They weren’t being written. In the last couple of years, whether it was by us searching for something and turning it into a female character, or developing it yourself, you weren’t seeing it. But just in the last couple of years, things have shifted. The fact that Jonas and Alfonso wrote this specifically as a woman, it wasn’t an afterthought. It was the integral part of the story. I don’t want to say revolutionary, but its revolutionary. And the fact that a studio, on blind faith, would fund something as unknown as this is revolutionary. So to be able to be the person to do it is beyond humbling. It made you realize “I have to step up and be the best version of myself so, whatever is asked of me, I can produce.” Every day I’m so grateful. So Grateful.
Q: There isn't a single wasted moment in this film, why not with a very short narrative, why not give more space time to the characters?
JC: I guess the main idea that we had since the beginning was to do this strip down narrative where there would be this non-stop kind of pace and on that pace we would manage to engage the audience on that emotional and thematic level. The idea behind it is that when you engage the audience in such an instinctive almost adrenaline journey you're connecting more directly with them, It kind of becomes a cathartic experience where the adversities that the character rides is going through, they can project their own experience on to them.
AC: Jonas kept on say that it was about the audience using their own emotional experience to partake in the journey with the character. So he was always saying..the word he was using was it was visual and primal to keep everything just like that and he was a pain like that. He looks like a very nice boy but every-time I tried to expand on stuff he pretty much accused me of being old but in a very nice way.
Q: Sandra, sound is so important but your voice is one of the most reassuring things, watching the film. At one point, I wanted to walk out. I couldn’t take the tension anymore. Your voice really carries people through this journey. How did you reach that emotional point?
SB: Alfonso and I talked a lot about the voice. It’s very specific, the voice and the breath. Where in the register is her voice, someone who is that cut off? If I went a little higher pitched in my panic, it always rang false. Unless it was absolutely perfect for that moment, we always went back… “Next time let’s do it in that other register and try and stay there.” And then the breath was always followed… and the level of hyperventilation where that was in that moment. And then, back in ADR again. Can we go back through the fine-tooth comb and find any false tones in the voice – any breaths that are not connected. And are they too fast? Should we slow them down? There was a lot of time spent on that. The meticulousness with which you are allowed to work, on this movie, is unheard of. So we were always able to go back and say “I don’t know why, it just didn’t feel right. Can we go back and just try other levels with the voice.” I always wanted to give her her voice, based on her experience and where she was in life. So it was unapologetically cut off and monotone, but very distinctively her.
AC: But the detail that Sandra took from mapping, yeah I would be involved with her but in the end she was driving the boat of mapping up the braids. A lot of that was about braiding and the tone of voices and then how we shot it then kept on being very aware while we shot it. Then when we put it together to see exactly where we needed to mold it and yeah sometimes we had disagreements I would say I think here there should be more panic and she would say I'm not a damsel in distress. It's not about being a damsel in distress, if I'm in that situation I would be screaming and I said yes but you're a wimp. Sp end of conversation.
Q: Did you make a conscious decision not to show the people living on the ground?
AC: The thing that would break out the existential experience with the character...you can see this film as just a big metaphor, this is a film about the woman. Forget about space, it's a film about a woman who is drifting into the void, it's a woman that is a victim of her own inertia, it's a woman who lives in her own bubble. And confronts all these adversities and these adversities bring her further and further from human connection. And further from a sense of life and living. All these other elements are voices that are part of her own psyche that represent that search of life even is she is disbarring there is that part where your brain can be telling you I'm giving up and there is something that keeps on making the species going. Life keeps on going it's this search for life. So in many ways you can say it's a metaphor used as an internal journey of a woman it instead of this taking place in a city or apartment it's just in space.
