Alfonso Cuarón wrote “Gravity” because he needed money
Alfonso Cuarón recalls when he was “completely out of money” and told his collaborators that he needed to “write something but no arty shit.”
“I needed a screenplay that would let a studio give me a cheque. That same evening, we came up with the outline of ‘GRAVITY’.”… pic.twitter.com/Hbqj40pIQw
- Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) August 11, 2024
Four-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón was “completely out of money” after “ Children of Men” was a commercial failure and he wasn’t able to finance a following movie with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Guillaume Canet
He told his collaborators that he needed to “write something but no arty shit.” He needed a screenplay “that would let a studio give me a cheque.”
The same evening he started outlining “Gravity”
They realized that film industry was not technologically advanced enough for their ambitious project
“Fincher told us to forget about it, there’s no tech, wait 6 years. And he wasn’t wrong. James Cameron told us how we could do it but that was a 400 million dollar film. We told him only you can do that. And he said yeah you’re right. So we developed our own way.”
They used a mix of animation work and live-action camera work that utilized Industrial Light & Magic’s LED-based StageCraft technology known as The Volume.
“We developed the film over three or four years technologically”
WB insisted on testing the movie, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, with audiences and it did not do well, also due to incomplete VFX work
the studio started supporting it only after it did well at Venice
“Gravity” gained critical and commercial acclaim with over $723 millions at the box office and 7 Oscar Awards
Source
https://x.com/FilmUpdates/status/1822630784336798053