Movie Trivia #3
The Takeaway
The weightless scenes in Apollo 13 were not CG, and they were not done with wires. They were filmed in genuine weightlessness.
Here is the behind-the-scenes story, in brief.
Apollo 13 was released in 1995. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, it tells the true story of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, which suffered an accident on its way to the Moon in 1970.
There are scenes where the three astronauts drift gently inside the spacecraft. How were those filmed?
The first method tried was suspending the actors on wires. But the movement looked unnatural, the actors’ bodies hurt, and it simply did not work. At the time, there was not yet any digital technology for erasing wires, either.
So director Ron Howard consulted Steven Spielberg. What Spielberg proposed was an outrageous idea: use one of NASA’s training aircraft.
The aircraft was the KC-135, nicknamed the “Vomit Comet,” which had been used to train astronauts for weightlessness.
The plane flies in a huge arc. It climbs steeply, then dives, putting the cabin into free fall — and for about 23 seconds, real weightlessness occurs.
All the acting and filming had to be finished within those 23 seconds. That was how this shoot worked.
At first, NASA was reluctant to agree. The breakthrough came from Jim Lovell himself, the real-life commander on whom the film’s protagonist is based. Through Lovell’s efforts, a test flight took place, and NASA’s permission was granted.
The filming was done with full-size sets of the command module and lunar module built inside the cabin. Actors, cameras and equipment — everything floated together.
Seen in numbers, the scale of the shoot is astonishing:
- Parabolic flights: 612 in total
- Shooting days: 13 days over 4 weeks (2 flights a day, 80–100 parabolas per day)
- Weightlessness per flight: about 23 seconds
- Weightless footage gathered: just under 4 hours
In other words, for a few minutes of weightless scenes in the film, the cast and crew experienced nearly four hours of real weightlessness in total. It is said that some of the actors spent more time weightless than actual astronauts had.
Of course, it was not an easy shoot. Every time a period of weightlessness ended, there was also a stretch where gravity rose to about twice normal. Some crew members became unwell. Kevin Bacon has even described, in interviews, being vomited on by the cameraman.
On top of that, the aircraft’s engines were so loud that no dialogue could be recorded inside the cabin. All of those tense conversations while floating were re-recorded afterwards and dubbed in later.
Incidentally, the close-up shots of faces were filmed on the ground. The actors sat in a seesaw-like rig that slowly rocked them up and down to imitate weightlessness, and those shots were edited together with the full-body shots filmed in the plane.
Watch the film again and there is a detail you can spot. In the scenes where objects drift around the cabin, look closely at the movement: there is none of the tugging or snagging that wires produce.
Pens, food, bodies — everything floats in exactly the same soft way. That natural drift can only come from genuine weightlessness.
In an era when CG was not yet all-powerful, Hollywood rented an entire aircraft and went out to erase gravity itself. The reason Apollo 13’s weightless scenes still do not look dated today is that the real thing is right there on screen.
References
- Library of Congress, “Behind the Scenes of “Apollo 13″ with Ron Howard”
- Yale Film Study Center, “Film Notes: APOLLO 13”
- Science Museum Group (National Science and Media Museum), “Filming in Zero Gravity: How Apollo 13 was made”
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