Gravity (film)

Theatrical release poster
Gravity
Directed by	Alfonso Cuarón
Produced by	Alfonso Cuarón David Heyman
Written by	Alfonso Cuarón Jonás Cuarón
Starring	Sandra Bullock George Clooney
Music by	Steven Price
Cinematography by	Emmanuel Lubezki
Studio(s)	Heyday Films Esperanto Filmoj
Distributor	Warner Bros. Pictures
Language	English
Budget	$80–130 million
Gross revenue	$723.2 million

Gravity is a 2013 science fiction thriller film directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who also co-wrote, co-edited, and produced the film. It stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as American astronauts who are stranded in space after the mid-orbit destruction of their Space Shuttle, and attempt to return to Earth.

Cuarón wrote the screenplay with his son Jonás and attempted to develop the film at Universal Pictures. Later, the distribution rights were acquired by Warner Bros. Pictures. David Heyman, who previously worked with Cuarón on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), produced the film with him. Gravity was produced entirely in the United Kingdom, where British visual effects company Framestore spent more than three years creating most of the film's visual effects, which involve over 80 of its 91 minutes.

Gravity opened the 70th Venice International Film Festival on August 28, 2013, and had its North American premiere three days later at the Telluride Film Festival. Upon its release, Gravity was met with widespread critical acclaim, with praise for its direction and visuals. Considered one of the best films of 2013, it appeared on numerous critics' year-end lists, and was selected by the American Film Institute in their annual Movies of the Year list. The film became the eighth highest-grossing film of 2013 with a worldwide gross of over $723 million, against a production budget of around $100 million.

The film earned accolades from numerous critics and guilds. At the 86th Academy Awards, Gravity received ten nominations, including Best Actress for Bullock and Best Picture, and won seven awards, including Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects. The film was also awarded six BAFTA Awards, including Outstanding British Film and Best Director, the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, seven Critics' Choice Movie Awards, the 2013 Ray Bradbury Award, and the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

plot

The Space Shuttle Explorer, commanded by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, is in Earth orbit to service the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Dr. Ryan Stone is aboard on her first space mission, to perform a set of hardware upgrades on the Hubble. During a spacewalk, Mission Control in Houston warns Explorer's crew about a rapidly-expanding cloud of space debris accidentally caused by the Russians having shot down a presumed defunct spy satellite (see Kessler syndrome) and orders the crew to return to Earth immediately. Communication with Mission Control is lost shortly thereafter as more communication satellites are knocked out by the debris.

High-speed debris strikes the Explorer and Hubble, tearing Stone from the shuttle and leaving her tumbling through space. Kowalski, using a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), rescues Stone, and they return to the Explorer, soon discovering that the Shuttle has suffered catastrophic damage and the rest of the crew are dead. Stone and Kowalski decide to use the MMU to reach the International Space Station (ISS), which is in orbit about 1,450 km (900 mi) away, Kowalski estimating that they have 90 minutes before the debris field completes an orbit and threatens them again.

On their way to the ISS, the two discuss Stone's home life and her daughter, who died young in an accident. As they approach the station, they see that the ISS's crew has evacuated using one of its two Soyuz spacecraft, the remaining Soyuz spacecraft exhibiting damage with its parachute having been deployed in space rendering it unable to return to Earth. Kowalski suggests using it to travel to the nearby Tiangong space station, 100 km (60 mi) away, in order to board the Shenzhou spacecraft to return safely to Earth. Out of air and maneuvering fuel, the two try to grab onto the ISS; the duo's tether snaps on one of the station's solar panels. Stone's leg gets entangled in the Soyuz's parachute cords and she grabs a strap on Kowalski's suit, but it soon becomes clear that the cords will not support them both. Despite Stone's protests, Kowalski detaches himself from the tether to save her from drifting away with him. Stone is pulled back towards the ISS, while Kowalski floats away.

Stone enters the space station via the airlock of the Pirs module. She cannot re-establish communication with Kowalski or Earth, and concludes that she is now the sole survivor. Inside the station, a fire breaks out, forcing her to rush to the Soyuz. As she maneuvers the Soyuz away from the ISS, the tangled parachute tethers snag, preventing the spacecraft from leaving; Stone performs a spacewalk to cut the cables, succeeding just as the debris field returns, destroying the station. Stone angles the Soyuz towards Tiangong, but soon discovers that the Soyuz's engine has no fuel.

After an attempt at radio communication with an Inuk on Earth, Stone resigns herself to her fate and shuts down the cabin's oxygen supply to commit suicide. As she begins to lose consciousness, Kowalski seemingly enters the capsule; scolding her for giving up, he tells her to rig the Soyuz's soft landing rockets to propel the capsule toward Tiangong, before himself disappearing. Realizing Kowalski's appearance was a hallucination, Stone regains the will to go on, restoring the spacecraft's oxygen flow and rigging the landing rockets to propel the capsule towards Tiangong.

Unable to dock with Tiangong, Stone ejects herself from the Soyuz and uses a fire extinguisher as a makeshift thruster to travel to the rapidly deorbiting Tiangong. Stone manages to enter Tiangong's Shenzhou capsule just as the station enters the upper atmosphere, undocking the capsule just in time.

The Shenzhou capsule re-enters the atmosphere successfully despite having sustained debris damage during its descent, and lands in a lake. Radio communication from Houston informs Stone that she has been tracked on radar and that rescue crews are on their way. Stone opens the hatch but is unable to exit due to water rushing in. She takes a deep breath and holds it until the capsule sinks, allowing her to swim through the hatch. She sheds her Sokol space suit that is weighing her down, and crawls onto the beach before standing up triumphantly and walking away.

cast

• Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical engineer and mission specialist from Lake Zurich, Illinois who is on her first space mission. According to Cuarón, Stone is "a character who lives in her own bubble", and in the film "she's trapped in her space suit." Bullock's role was extremely demanding and daunting. She called the experience "lonely" and said there was "frustrating, painful isolation" on set, but in the best way, and described her working day on the shoot as a "morose headspace". She was cast in 2010, just a few months after finalizing her divorce from Jesse James. The Hollywood Reporter estimated that Bullock would earn at least $70 million based on theatrical returns alone for the film.
• George Clooney as Lieutenant Matt Kowalski, the commander of the team. Kowalski is a veteran astronaut planning to retire after the Explorer expedition. He enjoys telling stories about himself and joking with his team, and is determined to protect the lives of his fellow astronauts.
• Ed Harris (voice) as Mission Control in Houston, Texas.
• Orto Ignatiussen (voice) as Aningaaq, a Greenlandic Inuk fisherman who intercepts one of Stone's transmissions. Aningaaq also appears in an eponymous short, written and directed by Gravity co-writer Jonás Cuarón, which depicts the conversation between him and Stone from his perspective.
• Phaldut Sharma (voice) as Shariff Dasari, the flight engineer on board the Explorer.
• Amy Warren (voice) as the captain of Explorer.
• Basher Savage (voice) as the captain of the International Space Station.

themes

Although Gravity is often considered to be a science fiction film, Cuarón told the BBC that he does not, rather seeing it as "a drama of a woman in space". According to him, the main theme of the film was "adversity" and he uses the debris as a metaphor for this.

Despite being set in space, the film uses motifs from shipwreck and wilderness survival stories about psychological change and resilience in the aftermath of a catastrophe. Cuarón uses the Stone character to illustrate clarity of mind, persistence, training, and improvisation in the face of isolation and the consequences of a relentless Murphy's law. The film incorporates spiritual or existential themes, in the facts of Stone's daughter's accidental and meaningless death, and in the necessity of summoning the will to survive in the face of overwhelming odds, without future certainties, and with the impossibility of rescue from personal dissolution without finding this willpower. Calamities occur but only the surviving astronauts see them.

The impact of scenes is heightened by alternating between objective and subjective perspectives, the warm face of the Earth and the depths of dark space, the chaos and unpredictability of the debris field, and silence in the vacuum of space with the background score giving the desired effect. The film uses very long, uninterrupted shots throughout to draw the audience into the action, but contrasts these with claustrophobic shots within space suits and capsules.

Human evolution and the resilience of life may also be seen as key themes of Gravity. The film opens with the exploration of space—the vanguard of human civilization—and ends with an allegory of the dawn of mankind when Ryan Stone fights her way out of the water after the crash-landing, passing a frog, grabs the soil, and slowly regains her capacity to stand upright and walk. Director Cuarón said, "She's in these murky waters almost like an amniotic fluid or a primordial soup, in which you see amphibians swimming. She crawls out of the water, not unlike early creatures in evolution. And then she goes on all fours. And after going on all fours she's a bit curved until she is completely erect. It was the evolution of life in one, quick shot". Other imagery depicting the formation of life includes a scene in which Stone rests in an embryonic position, surrounded by a rope strongly resembling an umbilical cord. Stone's return from space, accompanied by meteorite-like debris, may be seen as a hint that elements essential to the development of life on Earth may have come from outer space in the form of meteorites.^{[according to whom?]} The film also suggests themes of humanity's ubiquitous strategy of existential resilience; that, across cultures, individuals must postulate meaning, beyond material existence, wherever none can be perceived.

Some commentators have noted possible religious themes in the film. For instance, Robert Barron in The Catholic Register summarizes the tension between Gravity's technology and religious symbolism. He said, "The technology which this film legitimately celebrates ... can't save us, and it can't provide the means by which we establish real contact with each other. The Ganges in the sun, the Saint Christopher icon, the statue of Budai, and above all, a visit from a denizen of heaven, signal that there is a dimension of reality that lies beyond what technology can master or access  ...  the reality of God".

production

development

As a child, Alfonso Cuarón had an affinity for space programs, dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and would watch live Moon landings on television. He was 8 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 and was profoundly influenced by Neil Armstrong. At that time, his grandmother bought a new television in order to be able to see the Moon landing. He watched space films, like A Trip to the Moon (1902), and was further drawn to films featuring the technology of space exploration and trying to honor the laws of physics, such as Marooned (1969) and Woman in the Moon (1929).

In 2008, money dried up on a project titled A Boy and His Shoe written by Cuarón and his son Jonás. They wrote a first draft of what would become Gravity in three weeks. After they finished the screenplay, Cuarón attempted to develop his project at Universal Pictures, where it stayed in development hell. When co-chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde were ousted from Universal in 2009, Cuarón asked for the project to be released, and then Warner Bros Pictures chief Jeff Robinov stepped in. After the rights to the project were sold, it began development at Warner Bros. Three years later, when the movie was still unfinished, Robinov was let go.

In 2014, author Tess Gerritsen filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. for breach of contract, alleging that the film Gravity is an adaptation of her 1999 novel of the same name. The suit was dismissed twice in 2015.

writing

Cuarón co-wrote the screenplay with his son Jonás. However, Cuarón never intended to make a space film. Before conceiving the story, he started out with a theme: adversity. He would discuss with Jonás survival scenarios in hostile, isolated locations, such as the desert (Jonás wrote a desert film, Desierto, which was released in 2015). Finally, he decided to take it to an extreme place where there's nothing: "I had this image of an astronaut spinning into space away from human communication. The metaphor was already so obvious."

casting

For the female role, Cuarón was in search of a lead that could "carry" the film in a manner akin to Tom Hanks's character in Cast Away, being the only person onscreen for a large part of the movie, and he began looking at a wide range of actors for the role. In 2010, Angelina Jolie, who had rejected a sequel to Wanted (2008), was in contact with Warner Bros. to star in the film. Scheduling conflicts involving Jolie's Bosnian war film In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), and a possible sequel to Salt (2010) led Jolie to end her involvement with Gravity, leaving Warner Bros. with doubts that the film would get made. The studio approached her for a second time to reconsider her former decision, but Jolie again declined.

In mid-2010, Marion Cotillard screen-tested for the part but instead went on to accept a role in another sci-fi film, Inception and the comedy–drama Little White Lies. Scheduling conflicts with the television series Gossip Girl in Manhattan and the film The Town in Boston prevented actress Blake Lively from getting the part. In September 2010, Cuarón received approval from Warner Bros. to offer the role without a screen test to Natalie Portman, who was praised for her performance in Black Swan (2010) at that time. Portman rejected the project because of scheduling conflicts. Other stars considered to some degree included Naomi Watts, Carey Mulligan, Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, Abbie Cornish, Rebecca Hall, and Olivia Wilde. Warner Bros. then approached Sandra Bullock for the role, and she was cast in October 2010.

In March 2010, Robert Downey Jr. had entered discussions to be cast in the male lead role, but he left the project that November to star in How to Talk to Girls—a project in development with Shawn Levy attached to direct. In December, with Bullock signed for the co-lead role, George Clooney replaced Downey.

filming

Made on a production budget of $100 million, Gravity was filmed digitally on multiple Arri Alexa cameras. Most of the film is computer generated. In the majority of shots the only elements captured with a camera are the faces. The movie was shot digitally using Arri Alexa Classics cameras equipped with wide Arri Master Prime lenses. The final scene, which takes place on Earth, was shot on an Arri 765 camera using 65mm film to provide the sequence with a visual contrast to the rest of the film. CGI elements were shot at Pinewood and Shepperton Studios in the United Kingdom. The landing scene was filmed at Lake Powell, Arizona—where the astronauts' landing scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) was also filmed.

Principal photography began in London, on 9 May 2011. The film contains 156 shots, with an average length of 45 seconds—fewer and longer shots than in most films of its length. Although the first trailer had audible explosions and other sounds, these scenes are silent in the finished film. Cuarón said, "They put in explosions [in the trailer]. As we know, there is no sound in space. In the film, we don't do that." The soundtrack in the film's space scenes consists of the musical score and sounds astronauts would hear in their suits or in the space vehicles.

For most of Bullock's shots, she was placed inside a large mechanical rig with thousands of LED bulbs to simulate outer space. Getting into the "lightbox" rig took a significant amount of time, and so Bullock stayed in it for up to 10 hours a day, communicating through a headset. Costume Designer Jany Temime said the spacesuits were fictitious – "no space suit opens up at the front – but we had to do that in order for her to get out. So I had to redesign it and readapt all the functions of the suit for front opening." Cuarón said his biggest challenge was to make the set feel as inviting and non-claustrophobic as possible, including having a large celebration each day when Bullock arrived. Shooting long scenes in a zero-g environment was a challenge, and so they used computer-generated imagery for the spacewalk scenes and automotive robots to move Bullock's character for interior space station scenes. Shots and blocking had to be planned well in advance for the robots to be programmed, which caused the production period to last four and half years. Cuarón had initially assumed it would take about a year to complete the film after completing the script. The lightbox was named one of 2013's best inventions by Time Magazine, and is suggested as a breakthrough in entertainment technology comparable to the motion-capture technology of Avatar (2009), the battle-scene software of Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), and the "bullet time" effect of Matrix (1999).

Warner Bros started screening the movie to test audiences well before it was finished, with crude animation instead of finished special effects. Initial feedback asked for monsters or aliens. Cuarón refused. It was only at the 2012 Comic-Con, where the opening sequence was successfully showcased, the studio was finally convinced the project could succeed.

cinematography

Cuarón wanted to do tracking shots, in part because the producers wanted to film it like an IMAX-style Discovery Channel documentary. Like his previous films, Emmanuel Lubezki did not use prior footage as the starting point of his work on Gravity. Instead, he carried out a search of images from NASA and Roscosmos. He and his team put together a large collection of photographs and picked what was best for the film. Lubezki said that they based the visuals on descriptions from astronauts, with some artistic license in depicting how the stars looked during the daytime in space. He wanted to incorporate the stars as much as possible to feel as deep as possible and avoid plain darkness and two dimensional feeling.

The 13-minute opening scene was challenging for the team to shoot. Cuarón asked Lubezki to start the film with a brightly lit Earth, adding shadows and dusk as the threat grows stronger. The light was constantly changing from one frame to the other with the actors spinning around the shuttle, the shuttle itself spinning, and the Earth spinning as well as orbiting around the sun all simultaneously. It took many months to design it and years to shoot it. When the team designed the sequence, Lubezki had in mind one of his favorite cinematographers, Vittorio Storaro, and how he utilized lighting in his films.

visual effects

Visual effects were supervised by Tim Webber at the British VFX company Framestore, which was responsible for creating most of the film's visual effects—except for 17 shots. Framestore was also heavily involved in the art direction and, along with The Third Floor, the previsualization. Tim Webber stated that 80 percent of the film consisted of CGI—compared to James Cameron's Avatar (2009), which was 60 percent CGI. To simulate the authenticity and reflection of unfiltered light in space, a manually controlled lighting system consisting of 1.8 million individually controlled LED lights was built. The 3D imagery was designed and supervised by Chris Parks. The majority of the 3D was created by stereo rendering the CGI at Framestore. The remaining footage was converted into 3D in post-production—principally at Prime Focus, London, with additional conversion work by Framestore.

music

Steven Price composed the incidental music for Gravity. In early September 2013, a 23-minute preview of the soundtrack was released online. A soundtrack album was released digitally on September 17, 2013, and in physical formats on October 1, 2013, by WaterTower Music. Songs featured in the film include:

• "Angels Are Hard to Find" by Hank Williams Jr.
• "Mera Joota Hai Japani" by Shailendra and Shankar Jaikishan
• "Sinigit Meerannguaq" by Juaaka Lyberth
• "Destination Anywhere" by Chris Benstead and Robin Baynton
• "922 Anthem" by Djay Adx and Gaurav Dayal
• "Ready" by Charles Scott (featuring Chelsea Williams)

In most of the film's official trailers, Spiegel im Spiegel, written by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in 1978, was used.

release

Gravity had its world premiere at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on August 28, 2013, and had its North American premiere three days later at the Telluride Film Festival. It was released in the US in RealD 3D and IMAX 3D on October 4, 2013, and in the UK on November 1, 2013. The film's US release coincided with the beginning of World Space Week, which was observed from October 4 to 10. The film was originally scheduled to be released in the US on November 21, 2012, before being rescheduled for a 2013 release to allow the completion of extensive post-production work.