Cuaron wins director’s award as Gravity gathers speed to Oscars

The success of the film, which is tipped to win the Oscars this year, has also put the spotlight on special effects industry in UK

Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron won the top prize at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) for the movie Gravity as the outer space drama gathers momentum, alongside American Hustle and 12 Years a Slave, for the Oscars.
The best director award is Cuaron’s first from the DGA and is considered a strong predictor of Oscar success in six weeks. The DGA top honour has correctly predicted the best picture Oscar winner for nine of the past 10 years.
“This is truly an honour and I’m humbled by being recognised by your peers,” Cuaron, 52, said, accepting the award at a ceremony in Los Angeles.
Cuaron’s special effects-laden existential drama about an astronaut who gets separated from her space shuttle also won a joint prize with 12 Years a Slave from Hollywood’s producers last week in a rare tie.
Gravity stars Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone on her first space mission and George Clooney as veteran astronaut Lt. Matt Kowalski, who tries to save Stone’s life.
In his acceptance speech, Cuaron related how part of his job as director was examining the high-resolution satellite photos of Earth that were used as the movie’s backdrop and how little they said about the lives of humans.
“What you cannot see from up there is this bizarre experiment of nature that is the human experience and that experiment is what directors try to sort out in their films,” Cuaron said. “And thankfully that experience is as diverse as the films that these film-makers make.”
Since 1948, there have been only seven occasions when the DGA award winner has not gone on to win the corresponding Academy Award. Last year’s DGA winner, Ben Affleck for Iran hostage drama Argo, was not nominated for the best director Oscar award, which was given to Ang Lee for Life of Pi. Cuaron’s film topped Paul Greengrass’ Somali piracy thriller Captain Phillips, Steve McQueen’s slavery drama 12 Years a Slave, David O. Russell’s 1970s crime caper American Hustle and Martin Scorsese’s tale of disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street.
So far in Hollywood’s busy awards season, 12 Years a Slave has earned victories at the Golden Globe Awards and from the Producers Guild of America, while American Hustle has won at the Golden Globes and for best ensemble cast at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Other winners of DGA awards include Vince Gilligan, creator of the television series Breaking Bad, who won the best director prize for a dramatic series, and Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won for best documentary. Her film, The Square, about Egypt’s revolution and its aftermath, has so far yet to be cleared by the country’s censors, but the director said that Internet piracy has allowed the film to be seen by at least 750,000 people there.
Director Steven Soderbergh collected two prizes from the DGA, one for best television movie or miniseries for Behind the Candelabra, a story of the pianist Liberace and one of his lovers, and a special prize for his service to the guild.

Gravity Oscar buzz showcases UK visual effects industry

Some viewers love Alfonso Cuaron’s space thriller Gravity and others think it pales in comparison with classics like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but pretty much anyone who has seen it agrees the visual effects are stunning.
While the film was financed and produced in the United States, the studio that created the visual effects — which have been nominated for an Academy Award — is British, adding to the accolades U.K. firms have accumulated in the field.
“It’s not a movie where we’re putting visual effects into a film,” said Tim Webber, who was visual effects supervisor for Gravity. “It’s a movie that is created using visual effects from the ground up.” British talent was propelled into the industry limelight by the Harry Potter series, which involved UK companies Cinesite, Double Negative and Framestore, where Webber is director of visual effects. The Harry Potter series was a sort of backbone, but the industry grew up to be quite significant around it and by the time it ended there was plenty of other work going through London to keep it going,” Webber said in an interview.
In Gravity, which has been nominated for a total of 10 Oscars, producers had to contend with the challenges posed by a film set entirely in space as well as replicating the look and feel of weightlessness in a 3D movie environment. “Gravity affects every tiny movement,” Webber said. To ensure the film looked as realistic as possible, “an awful lot” of the film had to be created on the computer and shots of the actors’ faces would then be added in, meaning the lighting had to be perfect, Webber said.
The first step was to create a pre-visualisation of the whole film, basically an animated version of the movie where everything, from lighting to the actors’ movements, was planned out in advance.
“When we got to the set … we knew exactly what the movement was going to be at every moment and exactly what the lighting was going to be so that we could make sure that we were filming George’s and Sandra’s faces to fit in with that movement,” he said, referring to stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.
To achieve the perfect effect, Webber’s team devised a “light box”, a 10×10-foot box with giant, bright screens on the inside, to replicate the environment around the actors.
Cuaron’s shooting style compounded the difficulties. About 70 per cent of the 91-minute film consisted of just 17 shots, Webber said, meaning a significant number of shots were several minutes long, in sharp contrast to most films in which shots only last a few seconds each.