10 Secret Techniques Films Used To Ensure Perfection

Much like Gondry, Nolan and Cameron, Ron Howard had a specific vision for Apollo 13 that he approached in a specific way. He’d decided that he wouldn’t be using any existing footage of the Apollo 13 mission itself: every shot would be original to his movie.

The interiors of the craft itself were built by the same people that restored the Apollo 13 command module - the Cosmosphere museum in Kansas and SpaceWorks. They ended up building two lunar modules and two command modules for use in the film: replicas, but replicas that used many of the same materials as the original, just created with removable sections to allow filming to take place inside.

The suits they wore were authentic reproductions, airtight when sealed and cooled by air pumped into them, and the Mission Control set was reportedly so realistic that one consultant who’d worked at the real thing couldn’t tell the difference.

With all that impressive, expensive verisimilitude, Howard was adamant that they wouldn’t be faking weightlessness for the film with awkward, uncomfortable wirework harnesses. Instead, the scenes requiring weightlessness were filmed on multiple flights aboard a Boeing KC-135 reduced-gravity plane, a fixed-wing aircraft nicknamed ‘the vomit comet’ that was used to train astronauts for NASA.

When following a parabolic flight path relative to the center of the Earth, the aircraft and its anything inside it are in free fall and during this time, as the KC-135 doesn’t exert any ground reaction force on its occupants, which then causes around 23 seconds of weightlessness at a time.