Though Netflix’s Away is a fictionalized version of Scott Kelly’s year-long stint aboard the International Space Station, as written about by Chris Jones in a 2014 issue of Esquire, there are many aspects to the 10-episode series that are grounded in truth. We here at /Film consider it to be Howard's best work. Short of filming from the whole thing from an actual rocket, it's a stunning technical achievement, with an ambition to pull off the impossible that truly fits the story it told.Hilary Swank on set as Emma Green, shooting the first episode of Away. Even though Ron Howard was bizarrely looked over for Best Director at the Academy Awards, he took home the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing for a feature film for his work, an acknowledgement of his ingenuity from fellow filmmakers. "Apollo 13" became the third highest grossing film of 1995, and it earned several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The dedication to detail paid off for the filmmakers.
We, of course, loved hearing something like that, since it meant we had achieved our goal of keeping it as realistic-looking as possible."
#NO GRAVITY FILM ARCHIVE#
Kelly Port, a visual effects artist who worked on the film in 1995, spoke to Variety about it: "Buzz Aldrin had asked what NASA archive was used to get some of the launch footage of the Saturn V because he had never seen it before.
The film's visual effects team also recreated launch footage of a rocket using miniatures and creative lighting that was so convincing that the second man on the moon was even fooled by it. It wasn't just the zero gravity shots that were impressive. It was an amazing experience and they let us do it. It looks challenging and exhausting, to say the least, but I have to admit that my inner child is incredibly jealous of it all.Īnd finally Jim Lovell intervened on our behalf and said, 'Why don't you give these guys one test flight? And just see if they can do it?' And we had to go get into these training and Air Force uniforms and go do it.
There's also an interesting moment where the football hits the ground when the gravity is doubled, and it does seem to bounce strangely. There would be a burst of action where the actors attempted to say their lines and pull off a shot, and then a literally heavy recovery as the whole process reset and gravity doubled. There's a great clip on YouTube of test footage featuring Paxton and Bacon throwing a football around, and it really gives a sense of how limited the window of time is that they had to work with. "We thought, anybody watching this thing is going to get motion sickness."Īctors Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon were directed by Howard with the energy and efficiency of a coach giving marching orders for a football play. "Actors and things kept drifting in and out of the shot," recalled NASA test director, Bob Williams, in The AV Club's retrospective. Cameramen, actors, and equipment were just floating around in a constant battle of trying to achieve some balance while also filming a scene. Each of those parabolas would guarantee a weightless moment, but it meant everyone and everything was weightless. Consider this: how much of your job could you accomplish if you were only able to work in 25-second increments? That's all the time the cast and crew of "Apollo 13" had to pull off their zero gravity shoots. The KC-135 was leased for six months of filming, and shoots would happen twice a day.Ī simple, elegant solution to Howard's problem, right? What's better to mimic the effects of floating in space than to simply film floating in a plane? The only problem was that even if the flights lasted around two or three hours, filming consistently was not possible. Imagine being on a rollercoaster and gently coming out of your seat for a short moment when racing down a drop, but on a massive scale. Through the rise and fall, around 25 seconds of weightlessness was possible. To achieve this effect, the plane was flown in curved arcs called parabolas. Sometimes known lovingly as the Vomit Comet (via ), NASA used the KC-135 plane to train, test equipment, and study zero gravity. After chatting about the problem to Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard looked into how NASA trained astronauts for weightlessness, and that's how he was introduced to the possibilities of the KC-135. CGI wasn't as advanced as it is now, and wire work would have been tricky to film to in a convincing way.
#NO GRAVITY FILM HOW TO#
The first problem to tackle was figuring out how to film the zero gravity shots so the scenes in space looked realistic. Director Ron Howard turned to Jim Lovell's book recounting the experience, "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13," into a movie.