Where to watch Gravity (2013)

Trivia & production notes

• Alfonso Cuarón watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon when he was seven years old in 1969, an experience that profoundly influenced his later filmmaking ambitions.
• Cuarón and his son Jonás wrote the first draft of Gravity in three weeks after funding ran out on another project in 2008.
• The script spent years in development hell at Universal Pictures before being moved to Warner Bros. after the studio's co-chairmen were ousted in 2009.
• Angelina Jolie was offered the lead role but declined twice due to scheduling conflicts with other projects, which temporarily put the film's future in doubt at the studio.
• Natalie Portman was offered the lead role without a screen test but rejected it after discovering she was pregnant with her first child in December 2010.
• Robert Downey Jr. left the male lead role in November 2010 to star in How to Talk to Girls, and George Clooney was cast as his replacement.
• For most shots of Sandra Bullock in space, she was placed inside a mechanical rig with thousands of LED bulbs and stayed in it for up to 10 hours a day while communicating through a headset.
• The film's spacesuits were custom-designed with front openings, which don't exist on real spacesuits, to allow the actress to exit the suit for scenes.
• The landing scene was shot at Lake Powell in Arizona, the same location where the astronauts' landing scene in Planet of the Apes was filmed.
• Warner Bros. screened Gravity to test audiences with crude animation before it was finished, but Cuarón refused their requests to add monsters or aliens to the film.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Gravity (2013 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.