While talking to MTV about her Oscar bait-y weepie "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Sandra Bullock revealed a few more details about the immensity and technological prowess of Alfonso Cuaron's forthcoming 3D sci-fi thriller "Gravity." She seems kind of at a loss for words, but basically it's going to be some seriously next level shit.
Bullock began by describing what it was like filming "Gravity," which took place in a giant, dark soundstage (not a surprise since the film is almost entirely set in outer space). "You would walk onto set and it was so isolating," Bullock told MTV. "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 it Iris. And there was a cube of lights with a metal contraption in the middle. They said, 'That's where you're going to be.'"
Clearly was not the kind of set where you kick back and relax. "I was either locked in it or strung from a 12-wire rigging system," Bullock said. Since she was all alone in this giant rig, they had to figure out a way of communicating things to her. Bullock explained: "Everything I did was through audio. We had an earwig system made and we chose sounds that were either ominous or sounded like space."
Set on a remote space station, the story begins as a team of astronauts are on an expedition outside the station, but only the team leader (Clooney) and his female colleague (Bullock) are left alive after an exploding satellite kills the other members of the crew, setting off a desperate race home for the latter to get to her child. That said, Clooney really only appears in the film (at least in the script we read) for about twenty minutes, meaning Bullock spent most of the shoot all by herself. "I never had a human to interact with until George showed up. And when he left it was like the great vacuum."
And it seems that it was as taxing psychologically as it was physically. "It was isolation like I've never experienced in my life," Bullock said. "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."
When asked to give a sense of what "Gravity" will actually become, Bullock became genuinely tongue-tied. "I don't know, it is going to be so profoundly silent and big and loud and I don't know how to explain because I have never seen anything like it," Bullock estimated.
She later added: "There are no words in my mental dictionary to describe what it was, but when you see it you'll just be like, 'Oh my effin' god.' " With the scope of the production even impressing Guillermo Del Toro, Bullock's inability to fully encapsulate the immense technological leap of "Gravity" has us truly excited for the film, which seems that will seem to blend hard sci-fi, technical wizardry and popcorn entertainment all in one package. We'll find out on November 21st, 2012.