Staff Writer
The premiere of Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, is coming up in North America on Friday, October 4th.
The director is tired. And grateful. But tired.
The scale of the project was immense – and took over four and a half years to make!
In a recent interview with Flicks and Bits, George Clooney sang Cuarón’s praises in the amount of preparatory work that had to be completed before the cameras even began filming the actors.
He said: “everything on this film was pre-set so far in advance that you can’t really change anything, so you have to make it look very natural even though it was something that was planned six or so months earlier.”
In addition to the prep (and the writing, which Cuarón did with his son Jonas), and the technology that hadn’t existed yet in order to make even it seem realistic (working and floating in microgravity). They were also pushing current technologies such as CG animation to its limits. Then there is the post-production.
This process alone took a year and was spent looking at computer screens and that is where Cuarón expressed his gratitude to Warner Bros. Their support in continuing with the project even through the loss of Angelina Jolie as the female lead, and consideration of multiple others to replace her. This was followed by the loss of Robert Downey Jr. as the co-star, even through the time it took to develop new technology, not being able to review any actual footage for “eight months to a year after the shoot.”
The release delayed by a year – and Warner Bros. stayed committed to the project. With Cuarón at the centre of this whirlwind of epic proportions, is it any wonder he expressed his desire to never want to do anything this big again? Granted, he does admit he enjoyed it and the challenges it presented. Considering the time and the effort he has invested in this film, I can’t imagine being anything other than exhausted by it all.
For an interview with Vulture, Alfonso Cuarón describes what may have been his guiding creative principle in making the film: “We wanted to surrender to the reality of the technologies that exist. We went further: We wanted it to be a journey in which people recognize the world that we’re talking about. We wanted it to almost have the experience of an Imax documentary gone wrong.”
A Guardian reviewer in attendance at the Venice Film Festival, where Gravity had its world premiere at the end of August gave it four stars with a comment of “brilliantly tense”, “a howl in the wilderness that sucks the breath from your lungs”. Right then!
Audiences will be able to find out for themselves very, very soon. North America on October 4th and the UK on November 8th. You’ve been warned. Enjoy the ride!
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