Making movies in space is way harder than you think

Tom Cruise is making a movie on the International Space Station and he could be the first of many. But how exactly do you shoot a movie in space? Well, thankfully I found a guy who's already done it. [MUSIC] Is Tom Cruise making a movie? Going to space By the next Elan Musk. If you like me, then you've watched every film set in space. Apollo 13, Armageddon Planet of the Apes. It was Earth all along who Hollywood gets a lot of wiggle room in sci fi they can set off explosions without actually killing anyone that They can cut Sandra Bullock loose in a spacewalk and not get a strongly worded letter from her agent. But shooting a movie in real space is way harder. Just ask Richard Garriott. He's the son of Owen Garriott a NASA astronaut, and he's also the sixth private citizen to pay to go into space. He also shot a movie while he was there. He shot the whole thing on his Sony HDV 7 camera over three nights on the ISS, edited it on his laptop and then premiered it to the crew while How he was on the space station. If you think of it a movie, the pre production is really critical. You plan out every shot so that once you have a large expensive crew on site, you can be as efficient as possible in recording it. Well in space, that's gonna be Far worse. Because not only is every moment of the crew far more expensive, but also every shot is far harder to get. Seriously this is the logistics of getting into space. You have to train your actors, and no I'm not talking about four years at, Yes dad, I know [UNKNOWN] theater degree wasn't the best use of my time. Before Gary it flew on the Soyuz in 2009. He went through two years of training. He was responsible for the life support and power systems. Remember there's only three seats on the Soyuz so He couldn't afford to just be a passenger. He actually had to do work while he was up there. The next generation of space tourists flying on Crew Dragon and beyond will have it a lot easier. But still, you're not going to get to space anytime soon without a bit of training under your belt. Okay, so say you can get your crew and your actors in Just face. Well, that's only the start. You've got another problem. microgravity. It's hard enough setting up a shot here on Earth, but when you escape the earth cool, things get really messy and we should know we've been doing this for a while. Directors have been recreating microgravity for years on the zero G aircraft also known as the vomit comet. His aircraft flies in parabolic arcs and it creates moments of microgravity but only about 20 to 30 seconds at a stretch. Ron Howard famously shot scenes from Apollo 13 on the vomit comet. And you might also recognize it from the film clip for okay goes on. Upside down and inside out. He's a cracker of a film clip. But over the course of the whole shoot, custom crew vomited like 58 times. Cool. Cool seems normal. When you're experiencing this kind of whitelist, Listen this for weeks on end. That's a whole new beast. Gary, it said that for about the first three days in space, he felt like he was on a 24 hour roller coaster, which is not at all terrifying and something I definitely want to do in life. And then there's getting around the space station. If you think it's hot enough for an actor to hit their mark here on Earth, then imagine doing it in a three dimensional fishbowl moving around flawlessly yet Forget it. On the space station, if you try to leave the floor by pushing with your toes to get something on another surface, you'll push so hard on accident that you'll go smack your head Really hard on the far side so you quickly learned to only move very delicately with your fingertips. Everything on the space station is held to the wall generally with a little piece of velcro and your legs are likely to be still bumping into things behind you. Your dislodging screwdrivers, film canisters, lens caps And by the time you get to the other end, you look around and there's a cloud of debris real stuff in space is not action hero fast, is slow and deliberate. According to Gary, the next generation of space movies that are actually shown in space aren't gonna look like Armageddon or gravity. They are gonna look a lot more like 2001 A Space Odyssey. Less explosions and panic inducing and more slow and measured. Directors are going to have to totally rethink how they script and shoot in space. No more beautiful wide shots. The ISS is really crowded. No more fast paced fistfights or no more running from the bad guy. No more driving your bus across a bridge because you have to keep the speed about 50 miles an hour, you know sacrifices, but it's also going to mean that directors can start doing really interesting things with filmmaking. And finally, there's the cost when Garrett flew on the Soyuz to make a short film. Film, his ticket cost $30 million. But that cost is coming down and experts say it could get as little as $1 million a ticket. As space travel becomes more affordable than we are probably going to see more films shot off this planet, but still at a million bucks of hope It may not be worth the hassles, cramped conditions a camera that wants to stay still and remember your co stars are astronauts. They're really good at exploring new reaches of the universe but not known for their acting..>> You are upside down.>> No you are upside down.>> Maybe it's aliens Interstellar aliens trying to invade the space station as a prelude to invade the Earth. Or maybe one of us is the alien. At the end of the day, it might just be easier to grab a bunch of actors, plunk them down in front of a green screen and do what I do anytime I make a mistake. Just fix and post.