The Oscar-winning movie Robert Downey Jr quit over a camera: “This is crazy”
Robert Downey Jr is hardly an actor unfamiliar with working on technologically advanced movies. After all, this is the man who spent the vast majority of the 2010s playing a superhero in a procession of CGI-heavy blockbusters that often required him to walk around set with tennis balls attached to a skin-tight leotard.
However, in 2013, a film was released that pioneered a particular kind of camera technology, integral to realising a vision of outer space like never before. Downey initially signed on to the project but backed out when he realised he wanted nothing to do with the newfangled camera rig.
By 2010, Downey Jr had played the titular Iron Man in two blockbuster solo movies and Sherlock Holmes in one rollicking adventure helmed by Guy Ritchie. You’d think this would mean he was more than familiar with working on films that required a lot of patience and imagination. These projects often forced him to act in front of green screens, opposite countless tennis balls on sticks that simulated the giant CGI monstrosities with which his character was meant to interact.
Thus, when Downey agreed to star in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity in March of that year, no one batted an eyelid. The film would follow two astronauts whose space shuttle is destroyed in orbit, forcing them to attempt an incredibly dangerous return to Earth. Cuarón worked with British special effects company Framestore on the daring visual effects, which needed to be flawless, as they would account for a mind-boggling 80% of the film’s 91-minute runtime. Ultimately, it took three years to perfect the technology, but Downey was only around for a small portion of that time.
“I went to do a test with a new sort of multi-spherical camera thing they were using for how they were going to do all the CGI,” Downey told Howard Stern in 2015. “And I’m one of those guys who can be comfortably uncomfortable pretty easily, and maybe I was just on my cycle or something, but I went in the morning to do that, and we did it for about 20 minutes, and I said, ‘This is crazy. How much longer?’ And they said, ‘It’s like another two to four hours,’ and I said, ‘No, it isn’t!'”
Naturally, this was a rib-tickling over-simplification of the situation from Downey, but Cuarón confirmed the actor’s discomfort with the technology was truly what put him off the movie. The “multi-spherical camera thing” Downey dismissively referred to was invented specifically for the feature, and was known as a ‘light box’. It was a nine-foot cube only big enough to house one actor, covered in 196 panels of 4,096 LED bulbs, capable of projecting imagery on the sides.
Intimidatingly, Sandra Bullock revealed she wound up strapped into the apparatus for up to ten hours every day, communicating with Cuarón through a headset. In fact, the rig was so unusual and restrictive that the crew made a light-up sign atop it that read ‘Sandy’s Cage’.
According to Cuarón, Downey reacted terribly to the technologically impressive but physically and emotionally isolating rig from the start. “I think Robert is fantastic if you give him the freedom to completely breathe and improvise and change stuff,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We tried one of these technologies, and it was not compatible. And, after that, we [had a] week that we pretended as if nothing was happening, and then we talked and said, ‘This is not going to work. This is tough’.”
Ultimately, though, Downey’s loss was George Clooney’s gain. The Ocean’s Eleven star stepped into the void left by the former, and Gravity soon became one of the highest-grossing hits of his career. It was also one of his most acclaimed, though, notching ten Oscar nominations and winning seven. These wins included ‘Best Director’ and, somewhat unsurprisingly, all the major technical awards. We doubt Downey lost any sleep over it, though.
