Imagine a universe in which the hottest girl ever, say Kirsten Dunst, is within eyesight. You love her, she loves you. Problem is, you’re stuck on separate planets.
In the sci-fi romance “Upside Down,” in theaters Friday, Jim Sturgess and Dunst take on the roles of planet-crossed lovers on two connected worlds with opposite gravities. Dunst, as Eden, lives “Up Top,” in a prosperous but soulless realm, while Sturgess, as Adam, slums it “Down Below.”
The two planets, connected by a menacing corporate tower, TransWorld, attach at “Floor Zero,” where their gravities meet at a precise point — one it is strictly illegal to pass. When Sturgess’ character risks crossing the border, he’s turned upside down and can only be righted by strapping enough “inverse matter” — material from the opposite planet — all over his body to weigh him down.
But he can’t stay too long. After just a few minutes, inverse matter starts to heat up, and will eventually erupt in fire.
If that cosmological construct sounds complicated, try filming it.
Seven years ago, director Juan Solanas, an accomplished photographer, had a vision that inspired the film.
“One morning, I just saw these two mountains, one on top of the other,” he says. “I watched that and saw a guy there and a girl there, upside down, looking at each other. Within five minutes, I knew [the film] was going to be a love story with opposite gravity. I [also] knew it was going to be a pain in the ass to shoot.”
Solanas enlisted production designer Alex McDowell — a veteran of spectacle-centered films such as “Minority Report,” Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and the upcoming Superman reboot “Man of Steel” — to bring his vision to life.
“One of the primary challenges was how do you orient yourself as the makers of the film?” McDowell says. “And how does the audience understand this world? It was dealing with a bunch of physics-based ideas that there wasn’t much precedence for.”
In one scene, the two worlds meet when Sturgess’ character gets a job on Floor Zero. These were the trickiest shots to get right, as the “up” world shares the screen with the “down” world. Low-budget solutions were not an option. “You cannot have a guy [strapped in] upside-down, his face becoming red,” Solanas says.
The director insisted that the experience be as “organic” as possible for the actors. Whenever possible, he avoided having them perform separately or in front of green screens.
For the Floor Zero scenes, McDowell’s team built two sets, which sat side-by-side, as if the screen had been sliced down the middle and folded open. When characters between the two worlds interacted, the “down” scene took place on one set while the “up” scene went on simultaneously on the other.
To film the action, Solanas used a “master-slave” camera system. The cinematographer shoots with the primary “master” camera on one set, while a computer-assisted “slave” camera films the other.
“The [cameras are] moving in relation to one another,” says McDowell. “So if the camera pans left on one character, it [automatically] pans right on the other character. So you always have the correct relationship between them.”
Once the cameras were in synch, the actors had to figure out a way to interact convincingly.
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“It gets complicated when you have an actor in one space, like Jim in his version of the down world, looking at Kirsten in the up world,” says McDowell. “If she’s moving, his eyes have to follow her position exactly, otherwise it looked as if they were in a dream state. They were not quite connecting with one another.”
Two tricks solved this problem. First, screens were placed above each set exactly where the other actor was to be, so they could look up and see one another in real time. For the eye-line issue, lasers were attached to the cameras so the actors could follow red dots to know where to look.
This meant a lot of staring at the ceiling for Sturgess. “Yeah, I [needed] a lot of massages for my neck. Twelve-hour days, doing this all day,” he says, whipping his head back in mock pain. “Occasionally I’d complain to the production office.”
In some scenes, characters cross into the other world, which results in a kind of zero gravity. This effect was created with wire work on sets to emulate buoyancy, as were numerous leaps and falls.
“It’s really unnatural,” says Sturgess, who practiced for a month before filming began. “If you don’t move with the flow of the wire, you sort of jolt in mid-air.”
If all this gravity talk is over your head, don’t worry. It was for Sturgess, too. “I wasn’t looking at it in terms of a scientific headspace. It was just like, OK, this is the alternative reality that these people live in,” he says.
“With anything kind of academic [in school], I didn’t pay too much attention,” he adds, laughing. “Which I regret massively now.”