“Part of the
thing that has been the search has been how to convey things without being explicit, without
doing expositions about them, how to express it, how to feel it, how to experience it?”
In this film it was important for the audience to partake in the experience.” “The idea
was to use the characters as vessels of those emotional experiences.”
30. 5:50 “There’s a relationship between the camera as an audience and a camera as
the audience being on the other side of the camera. In Gravity the camera as the eyeline
of the audience, as if the audience is floating together with
the audience.”
Everything was going to be experienced from the POV of the girl, everything is seen from
her POV, meaning, here over her shoulder.” “I discovered it was frustrating, the limitations,
but the consistency of the limitation creates an inner language, something consistent, formally
consistent.”
“I wanted it to be real-time. About finding a moment of truthfulness and registering that
moment of truthfulness in which foreground and background are the same thing.”
“But also in which to create the film language and experience in which characters as important
as context, each one informs the other.” “So I think in that sense it’s two parallel
stories being told with the same thematic.”
“This almost essay in the background”. “It became a film that was very intensely
researched, reference of a reference of something else… Everything in the film had to come
together.”
2. 7:35 – “All of those themes happen as the action is happening, how to do all
those themes without spelling them out, just through the visuals, allowing the audiences
to base their own experience and emotions into the experience that is happening in the
film.”
“And also try to give inside the frame as much thematic information, visual information.”
“Trying not always to be folkloric, it was always for some thematic purpose of the scene.”
“Everything had to deal with death.” “One thing is the projection of the other.”
This overarching theme of things coming to an end pervades Cuaron’s stories, invariably
depicting a world at its limit, its order contained and isolated, often maintained at
a distance and therefore fragile, a world at the very brink of collapse, mirroring always
the state of things for his characters…
“We wanted to do a film that takes place in space in which all the debris that happens
all the adversities are just a metaphor for the adversities that we all have in our everyday
life.”
“You have one character that is living in her own bubble literally, and is drifting
following her own inertia, getting farther and farther from earth where life and human
connection exists.”
The drift is a drift away from meaning, away from identity, from our center, and into chaos
and ultimately into death itself. But if Cuaron’s stories are about an end
of something, they are just as much about the transition into a beginning…
“What I’m interested in this is that if Y tu mama was the journey from teenage in
to adulthood, this was the journey from childhood into teenage.”
“Life is something that is transient. It’s something that also is our individual experiences
there are elements that we cannot control. In the end existence in nothing but a shared
experience of loneliness”
43. 17:00 “This idea of drifting into the void it’s something that I remember as a
kid, feeling this insignificant thing, when you get that awareness of that, that’s what
I’m talking about that shared experience of loneliness, (Gravity, ROMA, Harry Potter)
“Like everybody we go through some periods of despair. You feel like Ryan that you are
floating into the void, and you’re losing completely any sense of ground. The problem
is also that we’re the victim of our own inertia. In the space is the physical inertia,
but in earth is our tendencies, we have an inertia of how we do things. And we have to
learn to change that inertia if we want any change.”
“The only thing that keeps us going is that human connection.”
As the characters move deeper into the void they often find themselves encountering intermediary
or transitory figures who dwell in between worlds and who come to symbolize this move
away from the center into chaos…
But if these figures represent the move into death, they also leave us with the hope and
the possibility of new life…
But before this rebirth can be manifested, Quaron’s characters must first travel into
the underworld, into the unconscious, into their own darkest place. For it is here that
they can find the key to reemerge into a new world, into a new meaning. it’s in complete
darkness that they find their light.
“Part of the theme is a character who learns how to nurture herself one more time. It’s
about fertility from the standpoint from that urge of living. Even if the intellect of this
character loses faith of keeping on going, there’s an urge of life, this will of surviving
that keeps us moving.”
“I think it’s the same thing that keeps going Ryan Stone in the film, that even in
complete despair there is an impulse that’s even stronger that’s the impulse of life.
And that impulse is I think what keeps me going, but I think that impulse that keeps
everybody going.”
“At the end it’s a film about rebirth, for audiences to have a taste of that rebirth.”
“It’s about a character that’s lost in the void, and needs to find her way back,
and put her feet back on the ground and learn to walk again.”
“You hope people come out of your film with a slight different understanding about certain
things that you didn’t think before, or certain parts of you that you weren’t fully
aware of. I think that everybody lives through adversities, and naturally adversities help
us shape our lives and who we are, they are gifts of life that allow us to take new ways,
new roads. That’s why I talk about the possibility of rebirth, a new way
to see the world, a
new way of seeing our own life.”