'The Midnight Sky’ stars George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Tiffany Boone and Demián Bichir discuss their Netflix film in this interview with CinemaBlend Managing Editor Sean O’Connell.
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00:00 if we scour the backgrounds,
00:01 if we're gonna spot your gravity character,
00:03 Kowalski, floating by at all.
00:04 - The effects guys did this hysterical thing,
00:07 you'll probably see it at some point,
00:09 where they have ether, our spaceship is floating by,
00:12 and then it just goes by me and I'm like,
00:14 as Matt Kowalski, and I just go, "Little help!"
00:17 - You filmed that?
00:18 - Yeah, we filmed it.
00:20 - Does anyone copy?
00:23 - I have to warn them about the conditions on Earth.
00:29 - Is anyone out there?
00:30 - It's fantastic.
00:32 It actually ends up hitting me,
00:34 and then I'm like, "Woo!
00:35 "Hey guys, where have you been, man?
00:37 "I've been out here,"
00:38 and then they just eject me out.
00:40 - Oh my God, I need to see that, please!
00:42 Do they have extra scenes for a Netflix movie?
00:45 - They'll put it in, 'cause I just saw it yesterday.
00:47 They did it as a happy Thanksgiving,
00:49 and thanks for working with us,
00:52 just as a gift to Grant and myself.
00:54 But we definitely have to get it out somehow.
00:57 - That's amazing.
00:59 I am fascinated with your work as a director.
01:02 I love all the stories that you choose to tell
01:04 from the director's chair,
01:05 and we are fast approaching 20 years of "Confessions."
01:08 I wanna know something that you think
01:10 you are much better at now
01:11 than you were when you first tackled "Dangerous Minds."
01:15 - As a director?
01:16 - As a director.
01:17 - Well, I think I'm a little more relaxed
01:21 and open to certain kinds of input.
01:25 When I first started with "Confessions,"
01:28 I boarded every single shot.
01:30 I wanted to make sure I knew exactly
01:32 what everything was doing,
01:33 and I was pretty locked in on what I wanted it to be.
01:38 Good thing, good luck, we did a lot of,
01:42 there was a lot more improv and a lot more openness to it.
01:44 So as time has gone on, I think I've found,
01:47 for instance, I'll give you a really good example.
01:50 When Felicity says she was pregnant
01:52 in the middle of shooting,
01:53 that would have been pretty devastating
01:56 if it was 18 years ago.
01:59 I wouldn't have known what to do.
02:00 And this one was one where once we decided
02:03 that you have to accept it as opposed to try and hide it,
02:08 and you can write into it,
02:09 and it actually ends up becoming,
02:11 actually, I think it makes the film better.
02:14 - Miss Jones, I gotta start with you,
02:15 'cause your character showed me something
02:17 that I swear I've never seen on screen before,
02:19 and that's a pregnant astronaut.
02:21 I was so blown away by that as a character.
02:23 And then Mr. Clooney told me
02:24 that that was actually your pregnancy
02:26 and that they worked it into the story.
02:27 How special is that for you?
02:29 - Yeah, I think it might be the first depiction
02:34 of a pregnant astronaut.
02:36 So yeah, it was pretty revolutionary.
02:38 It was a very organic, instinctive process.
02:43 Originally, we were gonna CGI the bump,
02:46 which is what usually happens in countless films.
02:49 It's amazing when you look at the list of actresses
02:51 who've been pregnant making iconic pieces of cinema.
02:55 And we were sort of gonna forge ahead in that way
02:58 and let's pretend it's not happening.
02:59 And then after about a week of shooting,
03:02 George and Grant, his producer,
03:05 were watching the footage and they felt,
03:07 actually, no, this could be far more interesting
03:10 if we have Felicity be pregnant in the film.
03:12 And we went from there,
03:15 and it just made so much sense with the story.
03:18 It really heightened the stakes for us on the ship,
03:23 and particularly with David and I and our relationship.
03:25 And it just felt like a very natural way
03:28 to navigate the story, and was obviously very nice for me.
03:34 And I didn't have to worry about trying to breathe in.
03:37 - There is an antenna that's stronger than ours.
03:40 We get to that antenna, they'll hear us.
03:44 Take a deep breath.
03:46 - How many lines of dialogue does your young co-star have?
03:50 - One line.
03:51 - One line.
03:52 Is that the first time in your career
03:53 you've done this many scenes opposite someone,
03:56 a predominantly silent partner?
03:58 - Yeah.
03:58 Well, it was interesting.
03:59 There was a lot more lines for me,
04:01 and I was constantly taking the line and scratching them out
04:04 just because you realize that you have to be careful
04:07 what lines are important and what lines are just expository,
04:11 and telling someone something
04:13 that either they don't need to know
04:14 or we're telling for the audience's sake.
04:16 And I decided, I called Alexander Desplat,
04:19 and I said, "We're gonna use score
04:21 "as sort of our narrative through all of this,"
04:23 which I think will make it more a meditation.
04:26 - Also, how expressive is her face, though?
04:28 She says so much without saying anything.
04:30 - Well, she screwed it up for all the rest of us actors,
04:32 'cause also, by the way,
04:34 almost everything I did with her was one take, right?
04:37 And so literally, I shot all of our stuff,
04:40 and then a couple months later,
04:42 we started with the other actors,
04:43 and I would say, "Caitlin did this in one take.
04:45 "Go."
04:46 - An astronaut crew has to be able
04:50 to sell real camaraderie and teamwork,
04:52 and there are, the characters in this particular story
04:55 have been together for a very long time,
04:57 so I'm really curious what you guys did
04:59 as an ensemble to get to that comfort level.
05:01 - What did we do?
05:03 I don't, honestly, this is the nicest group of actors.
05:08 Like, honestly, they're all so sweet and so nice.
05:12 We did do a dinner at George's at the beginning,
05:15 pizza night at George Clooney's house.
05:17 - That helps.
05:18 - Where, you know, I know I sat next to Demian,
05:21 and we got to know each other, and it's just easy.
05:24 We just sit around on set, talk about our lives,
05:27 talk about our families,
05:28 and I think it just came pretty naturally.
05:32 I don't know how you guys felt.
05:33 - No, I agree with you.
05:34 It was exactly like that,
05:36 and then Kyle and I have met each other before,
05:38 briefly, during another film, "King Kong vs. Godzilla."
05:43 So we went out for a really nice dinner,
05:45 a couple of weeks to do something,
05:47 and we were best friends.
05:48 - You know, I have to bring up the spacewalk sequence
05:51 because it's truly an eye-popping moment,
05:53 but knowing that these sequences still come together
05:56 through the use of wires and cords and harnesses,
05:59 are those days on set that you look forward to,
06:02 they're magical when we watch them,
06:04 but putting them together,
06:05 how is it like for you guys as actors?
06:07 - Yeah, watching them is a lot more fun than shooting them.
06:11 I'll tell you that much.
06:13 Yeah, it's pretty tough work, and it is wire work,
06:17 and the key is putting maximum effort
06:22 into making it look effortless,
06:24 and that involves a lot of training.
06:27 That involves having the kind of control of your core
06:31 that is not your everyday.
06:33 Myself and Tiffany Boone, who largely were doing
06:37 the spacewalking, had two to three months of training,
06:40 and thankfully, we had someone like George
06:43 who had played astronauts himself, iconically so,
06:47 to guide us in terms of what it should look like.
06:50 Little tips like, you know, your body has to move
06:53 a lot slower than your mouth and your mind.
06:57 You know, those are things that,
06:59 in the red-hot eye of a scene, you forget,
07:02 and you need constant reminding.
07:04 - You would think by now, you would have figured out
07:07 an easier way to do this, but no,
07:09 it's still training for months in advance,
07:12 just working on my core, and then months of training
07:16 before we shot, while we were shooting,
07:19 on wires, people holding your feet,
07:22 people holding your hands.
07:24 Yeah, it's a whole thing, but it looks effortless at the end
07:28 so that's all that matters, it's worth it.
07:30 - Going back to re-watch the film a second time through,
07:33 I was amazed at how the set seemed really palpable,
07:36 that there was a lot of physicality to them
07:38 that you could touch and hold onto.
07:40 How important was that to you guys,
07:41 to have that element of that there?
07:43 - It was crucial, 'cause they created
07:45 such a fantastic scenery, fantastic space.
07:49 The production design is high-class,
07:53 and so that made our work very, very easy.
07:57 - There's some really strong themes of fatherhood,
07:59 parenting, and the relationships found in here, too.
08:02 I'm the father of two boys,
08:03 and I have some really interesting stories
08:05 about movies that have changed completely for me
08:07 from parenthood, so I'm just curious
08:10 if it's changed for you the types of stories
08:11 that you want to tell.
08:12 - I don't know, I haven't thought about that much yet.
08:16 I know that my wife and I went through my films,
08:20 what the kids could watch, and it was kind of like,
08:23 well, they could watch "Fantastic Mr. Fox,"
08:25 and then after that, it's kind of, you know,
08:28 they could watch "Batman and Robin" for a laugh,
08:30 but you kind of run out of things
08:32 that a three-year-old's gonna be allowed to see,
08:34 so I probably will have to look at some,
08:37 you know, "Sesame Street," the movie kind of things.
08:39 (upbeat music)