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One Giant Leap Director Roland Emmerich and VFX supe Peter Travers take us behind the scenes of their latest epic disaster movie Moonfall. By Trevor Hogg
D
uring the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the Moon was the center of space exploration for NASA. Yet in the past couple of decades, Earth’s closest celestial neighbor has been ignored for a variety of reasons. However, the Moon makes a big comeback in German filmmaker Roland Emmerich’s (Independence Day) latest $140 million epic thriller. Lionsgate’s new release Moonfall stars Halle Berry, Paul Walker, John Bradley, Michael Peña and Donald Sutherland, and reunites Emmerich with his Midway team — in particular, production designer Kirk Petruccelli, visual effects supervisor Peter Travers and special effects supervisor Guillaume Murray. It took Emmerich and his team four years to develop this tale of the Moon falling out of its orbit. “Moonfall is such a crazy story that we had to give it some reality, which is always tough,” admits Emmerich, who was inspired by the book Who Built the Moon? by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler. “Luckily, we had our visual effects supervisor, Peter Travers, whom we call ‘The Science Guy’.” Emmerich says he doesn’t believe in repeating himself. “Creatively, I’m going to places that I’ve never been before, and that’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey aspect. Technically, it was incredibly difficult to shoot this in 61 days under COVID-19.” He adds it was important to come up with realistic obstacles that the characters have to overcome. “My movies don’t care about being super realistic but need to have the feeling of believ-
ability. We have two or three dialogue scenes that are really good. It was a happy accident that I was allowed to cast John Bradley.”
Staging the Crash Originally, principal photography was to consist of 74 shooting days, but the costs incurred by COVID altered that plan. "It's incredible, when you think about it, that we shot this movie in 61 days. Mostly we built it onstage because it's always easier and faster,” says the helmer. According to him, 35 sets were constructed on six stages at Grandé
Studios as well as MELS Studios, both in Montreal, with four to five sets being shot per day. Adding to the authenticity was an original space shuttle cockpit brought in from a museum in Florida. “We had to divide and take things out to make it usable for all of the weightless scenes,” states Emmerich. “That was the most complicated stuff we did in the whole movie.” The director says compared to previous projects, the majority of atmospherics such as snow flurries were done digitally rather than practically. It took four or five months to do previs for Moonfall and its 1,700 vi-
‘My movies don’t care about being super realistic, but they need to have the feeling of believability.’ — Director Roland Emmerich
Disaster Dynamos: Around 600 artists from Pixomondo, Scanline VFX, Framestore and DNEG worked on the movie with only assets, not shots, being shared among the main vendors.
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april 22
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