If you’ve read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, you know one of the biggest challenges for writer-director Gavin Hood was bringing the Battle Room to life.
When Ender (Asa Butterfield) is recruited by the International Fleet, he’s sent into space to Battle School to learn how to defend the planet against the Formics, an alien race that nearly decimated humanity and is expected to return. While there are classes in Battle School, the central element of the curriculum is actually a game.
While on the film’s NASA Michoud Assembly Facility set in New Orleans, producer Linda McDonough explained, “They have two different 'gates.' They accumulate points by hitting each other with these lasers. The lasers don’t injure you; they freeze parts of your suit. But if either team is able to get a man through the other team’s gate, they completely win the battle.” Now just picture all of that in a zero-gravity environment.
So how did they make it look so realistic?
One Battle Room for one Battle School. Coproduction designer Ben Procter recalled, “[Gavin] basically felt that there was not a lot of a point to have multiple Battle Rooms as is described in the book. His idea, which makes sense, is that in a high school, it’s not like you have five football fields.”
Avoiding face replacements in post. Because filmmakers knew how important seeing their faces would be to the characters' journeys, the helmets the kids wear in the Battle Room were designed so the filmmakers could film both the action and their facial expressions at the same time, rather than having to do face replacements in postproduction.
Star wars. No, not that Star Wars. Inside the Battle Room, there are big triangular metal objects called stars that teams can hide behind or bounce off of to gain momentum. Colonel Graff can move the stars around from inside his office, creating unforeseen barriers.
Practice props for Battle Room training. Props master Don Miloyevich showed off one of Petra’s (Hailee Steinfeld) favorite training tools, a set of target balls. A tube that clips to her hip acts as a holster for the balls until Petra lets them loose. Once she does, they expand. Miloyevich noted, “You don’t see the expansion. That’ll be digital” as will their explosion.
Meet stunt coordinator Garret Warren. Warren has an absolutely massive resume including films like Immortals, Real Steel, Divergent and loads more. The guy is the best of the best, always coming up with innovative ways to make even the most dangerous or out-of-this-world action look real. And he’s equally as strong, thoughtful and admirable in reality, too. If you missed it, it’s worth catching this clip of Warren on The Jeff Probst Show talking about how he got what’s become an appropriately tough looking identifying factor: his eye patch.
From Avatar to Paradise Lost to Ender’s Game. Warren credits his ability to handle Ender’s Game’s zero gravity challenge to his work on Avatar. “That was when we really started to experiment with various ways to do it.” Just prior to joining Ender’s Game, Warren was hard at work on Paradise Lost, a film that never made it into production but did give Warren the opportunity to start dabbling in techniques that would permit actors to fly.
Belts, rigs and lollipops. There are a lot of pieces to the Battle Room zero gravity puzzle. First and foremost, Warren had to find a rig that would allow the actors to look and act weightless without the interference of wires or direct physical support from a stunt-team member. He got rid of the wires altogether and experimented with something called a spotting belt. “It’s how they teach someone how to throw spins on a trampoline in without killing themselves.” Because these belts aren’t designed to carry the user’s weight, they beefed it up. He said, “All of you could float in it. All of you, no matter what your size, your height, your weight, or your experience, can absolutely float, spin, twist, do whatever you want to do.”
Thirteen actors, one zero gravity formation. The challenge of floating 13 people in a precise formation seemed so colossal at the start that Warren considered just going the motion-capture route. However, in the end, they took the plunge and opted to do it for real, something that essentially turned the cast into puppets. Warren explained, “We literally made a marionette cage above 13 people and were able to move them like they were little puppets.”
Harrison Ford is the king of zero gravity. It’s one thing to see a group of young actors bopping around in the zero-g belts and rigs, but Harrison Ford? Yes, Colonel Graff gets a little zero gravity action himself and according to Aramis Knight (Bean), Ford nailed his wirework in the very first take.
Find out more about the locations and sets and check out our character guide too.
Catch the zero gravity action in the Battle Room when Ender’s Game arrives in theaters on November 1, 2013.
MORE FROM AROUND THE WEB:
