To date there have only been two movies filmed in space – the Russian comedy Yolki 5 had a bit on the International Space Station, as did this year’s The Challenge – and Tom Cruise and Doug Liman are supposed to be working with SpaceX on a feature shot in space. Given how many movies there are about space, that’s not many. And, you know, fair enough. It’s hard to film a movie in space. The lack of gravity would play havoc with the clapperboard, for one thing.
But Alfonso Cuaròn’s seven Oscar-winning triumph Gravity, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, was originally hoped to become the first feature film shot in actual space. (Whether it would have featured actual space debris actually killing actual George Clooney, we shall never know.) There were a few reasons why it didn’t happen. Firstly, money. “That was number one,” Cuaròn tells Empire in our new issue. “Number two, and the thing that killed the whole conversation, was Sandra.” Sandra Bullock, Cuaròn’s lead, was absolutely against it. “Because Sandra had already suffered two airplane accidents. Not one, but two. For her, flying is a big sacrifice. And for her the idea of getting into a rocket or something like that, it was a no-no, you know?”
Cuaròn and team tried shooting on the Vomit Comet – the parabolic flights which recreate weightlessness for 30 seconds at a time as the plane dives – but couldn’t get long enough shots from it. So, they went to NASA. “At the beginning NASA was very helpful with us. We went to Houston. We talked about the space station, which was going to be an important feature of the film. But when they read the script and saw that there was going to be a kind of disaster in space, that is pretty much against NASA’s policy. So they could not support us anymore.” Again: probably fair enough. You’d never have got P&O Cruises to sponsor The Poseidon Adventure.
Read Empire’s full Gravity anniversary interview with Alfonso Cuaròn in the November 2023 issue, on sale now. Order a copy online here, or become an Empire member to access the digital edition today.