GRAVITY directed by Alfonso Cuaron, written by Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron, with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. A Warner Bros release. 91 minutes. Opens Friday (October 5). For venues and times, see listings.
Alfonso Cuaron has demonstrated a remarkable command of cinema, having given the Harry Potter series its first signs of depth in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban and imagined a near-future England collapsing into despair in Children Of Men.
But he’s never done anything like Gravity, a watershed survival drama about American astronauts stranded in the thermosphere after an accident destroys their ride home.
The movie is a marvel of visual effects and dramatic tension, and Sandra Bullock is as good as she’s ever been as panicked novice Ryan Stone. But it’s also a hell of a ride.
“It has to be fun, you know?” the director says. “You have to be excited. You have to be completely hooked and connected to the screen.”
Sitting in a suite at the Shangri-La the day after Gravity’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Cuaron explains what drew him to the project, which he wrote with his son Jonas.
“I was going through one of those periods of adversity, and you always hope that you’re going to come out the other side with a sense of rebirth,” he says. “Rebirth’ meaning gaining a new knowledge of yourself. So that was the point of departure on how to do the whole thing. It was about how to build up the character, and again trying to be as economical as possible. What [Jonas] kept saying was Without unnecessary rhetoric’ – minimizing the backstories and definitely not cutting to Planet Earth.”
That meant spending almost every second with Ryan Stone in the void. And Cuaron felt that Bullock was the only actor for the role.
“I went to meet with her in Austin,” he says. “She read the script, she liked it, but we didn’t talk about the script. We talked about the themes. And this theme of adversity was something she also knew very well. So we just had a conversation, the whole afternoon and evening, about the connection between adversity and life.”
The meeting ended without a clear commitment from Bullock – but that almost didn’t matter.
“It wasn’t I’m going to do it’ or I’m not going to do it,'” Cuaron explains, “it was Wow, I had an excellent conversation with this woman.’ I didn’t get a straight answer, because I didn’t ask a straight question, but it was great. I remember calling [producer] David Heyman and saying, Well, I had a great conversation. I have no idea.’ But for Sandra that was it, of course.”
Cuaron credits another collaborator, his old friend Guillermo del Toro, with saving him from his own worst instincts while he was developing the project.
“Early on, going through the process, Gravity had the possibility to become a very pretentious film,” Cuaron says. “Jonas was against it, but I wanted to give it a try, and then Guillermo gave me his famous speech: Why you want to shit where you eat?'”
He laughs, quoting his friend.
“Part of the importance of this is that you go through [her] emotional journey, and it’s something that’s highly entertaining. That is what’s going to make this film special, not to do an abstract, conceptual film.’
“And that was a great thing.”
Interview Clip
Alfonso Cuaron on the score — and the sound mix — of Gravity:
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
