THE TERMINAL MAN
GEORGE CLOONEY TALKS DIRECTING HIS FIRST BIG SPACE MOVIE
What was the experience of working in Iceland like?
We first went there in August [2019] and scouted. We went up to one of the largest glaciers in Europe, and the first thing that takes your breath away is how much of the glacier has gone. It’s shocking to see how global warming is a reality in places like that. In Iceland, you can measure it. There’s no one debating science with the people of Iceland. They go, “No, this is real. There’s six miles gone of what’s been here for thousands and thousands of years.” It’s stunning. To go by the great icebergs that are floating in the lakes is incredible. We saw the Northern Lights up there, which was just amazing. I was looking out of my window and the sky was green.
Did you have advisors for the science aspects of the script?
Oh yeah, we had all of those guys, which was pretty great. Building the spaceship was a blast. We’re using the same stuff that NASA use, so it’s all true to life. But on the other hand, there is a moon and Jupiter in the story, and the advisors went, ‘We would all die from the radiation if that happened!’ So we just forget about that stuff. This is science fiction.
You’ve worked on space movies before: Solaris and Gravity. Was that helpful?
Alfonso [Cuarón] is not just a great friend, he’s also one of the great directors in the game.
He has such a great understanding of that idea of point of view. Alfonso has always been a maestro. You can tell that by the long shots he does in Children Of Men, and all those movies. He shoots everything with a specific point of view. I love the way he shoots. He’s smart. I called him and said, “I’m shooting a space movie.” And he goes, “Oh no!” When we started on Gravity, he thought he was going to have an eight-week shoot. He was like, “This is going to be easy.” But it was a haul for him because he was shooting stuff where the technology was yet to be invented, so they were waiting for it to catch up.
And Steven [Soderbergh] is a great friend and a mentor to me. Because we did Solaris together, I had some ideas of what I wanted to do, and I know some things. Like, I learned from him early on that the reflections of the glass on the helmet can get you into trouble, and a lot of times you take the glass out. I learned a lot of tricks from Steven because he’s really smart about going, “No, I only need the shot from here to here,” which can save the film budget a lot of money.
I learned early on that the reflections of the glass on the helmet can get you into trouble
Did Felicity Jones’s pregnancy affect plans?
A week before we went into principal photography, she called and said, “Well, I’m pregnant.” I said, “Congratulations!” Then we had a long talk about it. She didn’t start working until January, but we started shooting on 7 October – so when she got here, she was already showing. We were like, “Okay, digitally we could do a Robert De Niro from The Irishman.” But no-one was comfortable with that. More importantly, she wasn’t comfortable. I’ve worked with actresses when they were pregnant and tried to hide it before, and it’s not really fair.
[Producer] Grant [Heslov] and I sat down and started thinking, “Well, of course she’s pregnant in the story. It makes absolute sense that she’s pregnant.” It changed the temperature of the film in a way that we couldn’t believe. Plus it makes the ending so profound. It’s also fun to be able to show a pregnant woman out doing a spacewalk. She’s doing all of this stuff and functioning. It reminded me of Fargo: she continues to do her thing, and life goes on. You’ve got to get on with it and get to work – and it’s really empowering. The minute we took the burden out of trying to hide it, she was set free. When people are on a spaceship for three years, things happen! AT
The Midnight Sky will be in select UK cinemas from 11 December (assuming they’ve reopened...), and on Netflix from 23 December.