A small crew of intrepid explorers undertake a journey into outer space that becomes infinitely more harrowing than they had anticipated--enough to make them laugh, cry and curse their fates. This is the story of Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock as a medical engineer and George Clooney as a veteran astronaut who, during a routine mission, become untethered from their shuttle, lose contact with earth and must rely on MacGyver-in-space improv skills for a chance of reaching home--or even a safe vessel--before their oxygen runs out.
But this is also the story of the filmmakers behind Gravity, director Alfonso Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and visual-effects supervisor Tim Webber, who resolved to achieve the impossible: an immersive, visually stunning masterpiece that is the first film predominantly set in zero gravity. The movie is astonishing, vacuum-packed with technological marvels and ethereal wonder, with not a single frame of evidence of the blood, sweat and tears poured into it during a 4½-year gestation.
"The making of this film, in many ways, mirrored the characters' experiences," says Cuarón, who spoke with Time at the Warner Bros. offices in midtown Manhattan (like Time, Warner Bros. is owned by Time Warner). "It was a journey of adversities." The watchword on the set, Cuarón explains, was debris: a reference to the fragments of destroyed satellites and other massive shards of space junk that periodically hurtle toward Gravity's astronauts. "We were constantly saying to each other, 'O.K., we have debris again! Debris is attacking us again!'" recalls Cuarén, who co-wrote the script with his son Jonás. "The problems we faced reached absurd levels, so ridiculous that you had to laugh."
Director of Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Children of Men (2006) and one of the most critically acclaimed of the Harry Potter movies, Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Cuarón has been a space cadet since childhood. "I was 7 when I saw Neil Armstrong on TV, stepping on the moon," he says. "I had my photos of Yuri Gagarin and the Apollo crew in my room. I wanted to be either an astronaut or a movie director." When, decades later, the director made a movie about astronauts, he named it after its biggest physical and technical hurdle. "Trying to make a movie that takes place in microgravity when you're shooting on earth--it's hard," he says with knowing understatement.
Making a Cuarón movie in zero gravity is even harder, because he is committed to long, unbroken, often extraordinarily complicated one-take shots. "With Y Tu Mamá También, we started doing all these long shots, and we took that to a new extreme with Children of Men," says Lubezki, who has known Cuarón since they were teenagers growing up in Mexico City. ("I'd go see a Fellini movie or a Japanese movie," Lubezki recalls, "and afterward Alfonso would always be outside the theater, with a beautiful girl and a bunch of friends, explaining to everyone what the director was trying to do.") "With a long shot, it's immersive. It helps the audience to enter into the film in a much deeper way than when you're cutting," Lubezki says. "I knew immediately with Gravity that Alfonso would want that same immersive experience."