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Why Alfonso Cuaròn's Gravity Kept Its Production On Earth

Writer and director Alfonso Cuaròn has explained why Gravity didn't shoot any scenes in space, and the reason wasn't just budgetary.

In the age of practical effects above all else, we all just had a summer of making jokes about whether or not Christopher Nolan was actually going to set off an atomic bomb for Oppenheimer. In terms of space, plenty of films have taken place above Earth, but only two have actually gone to space, and one of them hasn't come out yet and, of course, stars Tom Cruise. One of the more realistic movies that came out in the last ten years was Alfonso Cuaròn's Gravity, which walked away with seven Academy Awards when it came out in 2013. Empire got to speak to Cuaròn to celebrate the film turning ten years old and asked him why they didn't do any shots in space. The most apparent reason was budget, but he revealed a second reason.

"That was number one," Cuaròn says. "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?"

So Cuaròn did what any director would do that was trying to be accurate, and he went to NASA. They tried to do some shots on the infamous vomit comet plane, but that didn't work out. However, when NASA got their hands on the Gravity script and saw what the movie was about, they weren't exactly keen to be involved.

"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."

Who can really blame them? In the last ten years, the idea of commercial space flight has become a reality and a film showing not only how wrong things could go but how alone you are if things go wrong. We don't blame NASA for not wanting to be involved with a film like Gravity. At the moment, Cuaròn has two television shows as a director in varying levels of development and a film called Jane in pre-production as well. His last feature film was Roma in 2018.

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