'The Midnight Sky' Interviews with George Clooney, Felicity Jones And More
'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.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
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)