Warning: Spoiler alert on “Gravity.” Don’t read it if you plan to see the film!
“Gravity” star George Clooney says he didn’t write a key scene in the movie that put his character back in the space drama — but he did help solve a transition problem for Sandra Bullock‘s character.
“I didn’t write any scene,” he told TheWrap in an exclusive interview on Wednesday, referring to reports that he’d written a critical scene in which his character, Matt Kowalski, returns to Bullock, playing astronaut Ryan Stone, who is in a dream state.
“That scene was there from the minute I was handed the script,” he said. “The problem they were having was afterward.”
Director Alfonso Cuarón told Vulture in an interview this week that Clooney had contributed to the scene, which has since been misinterpreted to mean he’d written the whole sequence.
(At right: Cuarón, Bullock and Clooney at an Academy screening of “Gravity.)
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“Alfonso’s such a sweet guy. He hands out credit to everyone all the time,” said Clooney. “I said, ‘You guys are struggling, here’s an idea.’ So I wrote out a scene, and there’s a portion of it in the movie about Sandy wanting to live. They were struggling with how to tell people she wants to live, and I said, ‘Maybe you say she talks to her little girl and says Mommy loves her.’”
He added: “I sent him the scene as I was leaving out of London — I said, ‘Maybe this helps. Maybe this will fix the problem.’ Alfonso said they shot a version of it.”
He added: “I would never write myself a scene to come back in.”
Clooney also said he was amazed at how well the film has done at the box office, already taking in almost $100 million worldwide.
“There was great deal of concern at the studio and at every level that it would be a very expensive art film,” said Clooney. “Alfonso just shrugged his shoulders and got to work.”
But, he said, the effort took a toll on the filmmaker because every change required a huge level of complexity. “I’d look at him every six months and say are you OK? It was killing him … It was a very frustrating process for him. He stuck with it. I couldn’t in a billion years dream of doing what he did.”
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Neither, apparently, could Steven Spielberg, said the actor-director.
“I was talking with Spielberg the other day. He said, ‘I can’t speak after seeing this movie. What were you guys doing?’ I said we didn’t know. We were floating with this weird equipment with a computer geek behind our heads. Alfonso and (cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) Cheevo running things. We’d say this was crazy. They knew what they were doing.”