Gravity - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[elmer]

There are several references to Kowalski's hopes of breaking Anatoli Solovyev's EVA record. This is not for a single spacewalk (as of the end of 2014 that is jointly held by Susan Helms and James S. Voss, at 8 hours 56 minutes) but to the cumulative duration over a career. Between 17 July 1990 and 14 January 1998 Solovyev carried out sixteen EVAs on four separate missions, with a total time of 79 hours 51 minutes.

[richard]

When Sandra Bullock attempts to make contact with N.A.S.A. at I.S.S., at the left-hand side of the radio there's a copy of the Vitruvian Man, which is a famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Encyclopaedia Britannica online states about it: "He believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe." This work serves as the base of the patch on the right shoulder of the space suit of a spacewalker.

[janice]

Ryan refers to her mission as S.T.S.-157 in one of her transmissions. In reality, the 135th and final Space Shuttle mission was S.T.S.-135. It launched on July 8, 2011 and landed on July 21, 2011.

[sara]

Along with 12 Years a Slave (2013), this is the first film to tie for Best Picture at the Producer Guild Awards.

[harry]

Alfonso Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber decided they couldn't make the film they wanted using traditional methods. For the space-walk scenes, says Webber, "We decided to shoot (the actors') faces and create everything else digitally." To do that, Lubezki decided he needed to light the actors' faces to match the all-digital environment. Whether the characters were floating gently, changing direction or tumbling in vacuum, the facial light would need to perfectly match Earth, Sol and the other stars in the background. "That can break easily," explains Lubezki, "if the light is not moving at the speed that it has to move, if the position of the light is not right, if the contrast or density on the faces is wrong." Lubezki suggested folding an L.E.D. screen into a box, putting the actor inside, and using the light from the screen to light the actor. That way, rather than moving either Sandra Bullock or George Clooney in the middle of static lights, the projected image could move while they stayed still. The "light box", key to the space-walk scenes was a nine-foot cube just big enough for one actor.