Sandra Bullock Discusses the "Isolating" Experience of Shooting Gravity
Posted 12.21.11 by Ryan
After a casting process that took around nine months, director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) finally started shooting his upcoming sci-fi movie Gravity at the end of May with actors Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in tow. A plot synopsis released this week showed why Gravity is reportedly 60% CGI, revealing that the movie follows Bullock and Clooney as two astronauts stranded in space after their shuttle is destroyed.
With the movie wrapped and awaiting release next year, Bullock discussed with MTV what it was like to work on the movie, which was shot almost entirely on a sound-stage. Bullock admitted that "the technology on this movie was so isolating," and hinted at the exhausting conditions she endured during the shoot, Bullock added, "And I have the messed-up back to prove it."
The first day on set, all you see is this large black arm that I realized is what made the cars in Detroit. We called her 'Iris,' and she was on a long track, and there was a cube of lights with this metal contraption in it. They go, "That's the light box where you're going to be." I was either locked in that or strung from a 12-wire rigging system. Everything I did was through audio. We had an earwig system made and we chose sounds that were either ominous or sounded like space.
Gravity is going to be a fairly Bullock-centric movie, as she says that that Clooney was the only other person she had to interact with during the process, adding that, when he left "it was like the great vacuum."
It was isolation like I've never experienced in my life. You just had to let go and commit to that process. It required training and workouts like I never thought I'd be capable of, but you had to in order to sustain what they wanted your body to do.
Cuarón's friend and fellow director Guillermo del Toro has previously described Gravity as "incredibly human, but Kubrick-ian in [its] precision." When Bullock was asked what kind of tone audiences can expect from Gravity, the Academy Award–winning actress couldn't answer.
I don't know — it is going to be so profoundly silent and big and loud. I don't know how to explain it, because I have never seen anything like it. I never experienced anything like it. There are no words in my mental dictionary that can describe what this experience was, but once you see it, you're just going to be like, "Oh my effing God."
Next Showing: Gravity opens on November 21, 2012