Behind-the-Scenes: Ron Howard's APOLLO 13

Written by Anthony Watkins

On April 11, 1970, the world watched Apollo 13 takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, headed to the moon for another lunar landing. Little did people know, however, that this seemingly ordinary mission would be completely different from the others, and that the outcome would be forever written in the history books. Two days into the mission, an oxygen tank in the spacecraft's Service Module exploded, crippling the ship and forcing the crew to abandon the lunar landing. It was a mission that required the teamwork of hundreds, and the prayers of millions, to reach home. 

In 1995, director Ron Howard produced a film that accurately depicted the physical and mental struggles the crew of Apollo 13 endured during their unforgettable journey. Titled Apollo 13, the film featured an A-list cast in Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, Kevin Bacon as Jack Swigert, and Bill Paxton as Fred Haise. Nominated for 9 Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and winning 2 Awards (Best Sound and Best Film Editing), the film was a major hit critically and commercially upon its release, and ended up grossing almost $174 million in the US alone.

In this article, we will take a brief behind-the-scenes look at how director Ron Howard was able to accomplish some technical aspects of the film, such as anti-gravity. We’ll also look at two key areas of the film, the explosion scene and the re-entry scene. 

To accomplish weightlessness in Apollo 13, Ron Howard used a method to accomplish true anti-gravity: free-fall in an airplane. Tom Hanks notes, “It flies in a parabola; it goes at a 45 degree angle up, and then it pitches over at 25,000 feet. As it goes over and pitches down, you are essentially in free fall inside the cabin” (Apollo 13 DVD). Of course not all of the shots from the film that take place inside the spacecraft were shot from inside the plane, as this would’ve required way too much time and too many resources. As a result, only the shots that showcase the astronaut’s entire body took place on the free falling airplane. The other shots, particularly the medium close-ups or close-ups, involved illusions, smooth editing, and miming by the actors to simulate weightlessness. In the end, director Ron Howard quoted, “If we tried to create the weightlessness with wires, I sort of shudder to think what the movie would’ve really looked like” (Apollo 13 DVD). 

A diagram showing the parabola flight path needed to achieve zero gravity. 

This is the type of plane Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton filmed in for the full body shots in space in Apollo 13. 

Of course the pivotal point in the mission of Apollo 13 was the explosion that occurred only 2 days into the mission. The explosion occurred due to a damaged coil that was built inside oxygen tank 2 in the Service Module. When Command Module pilot Jack Swigert stirred the oxygen tank, the damaged wire short circuited, and the tank exploded. As a result, a catastrophic amount of oxygen was lost, along with a severe power loss (since the oxygen was mixed with hydrogen to create electrical power). The Command Module Systems Controller noted, “I looked at my environmental control system cryogenics display of data and it said I had lost O-2 tank 2 and I was losing O-2 tank 1. I’m looking at not a single failure, not a double failure, not a triple failure, but I’m looking at a quadruple failure. There’s no possible way that could happen in this spacecraft the way it was designed!” (Apollo 13 DVD). Due to the explosion, the crew had to move to the lunar module and use it as a “lifeboat” to survive and make it back to Earth.

Because of the gravity of the explosion, Ron Howard needed to depict the scene as dramatically and accurately as possible. To accomplish this, Howard physically took the camera (and audience) inside the spacecraft to follow the explosion. In the end, it turned out to be a visually resplendent shot. Visual Effects supervisor Robert Legato noted, “No one’s ever seen it, you don’t know exactly what it did, but it has to be dramatic, it has to feel truthful…” (Apollo 13 DVD). 

The Explosion scene in Apollo 13. 0:40-0:49 is the shot described in the paragraph above, where the camera is taken inside the Service Module to track the source of the explosion.

Perhaps the best part of the film (and the mission), however, is the ending, as humanity triumphs in bringing back the three astronauts Lovell, Swigert, and Haise. Regarding the spacecraft itself, director Ron Howard had to come up with a way to visually represent re-entry. The “ionization phase”, which is the phase in which the spacecraft travels through Earth’s atmosphere, was tricky to film because, as Robert Legato noted, “there’s no documentation on it and everybody has a different impression. All we had to go by was the astronauts, who said it felt like you’re in a fluorescent tube being lit up. So that doesn’t help us too much but we thought, well when you’re being hit with friction, it would just glow red and then go on fire I guess…there’s a technique of shooting fire where you make it kinda liquidy by instead of shooting fire at 24 frames per second, you shoot it at 4 seconds per frame so it gets really blurry and smeary and creates this kind of…looked like an ion storm to me!” (Apollo 13 DVD).

For the final splashdown of the craft in the ocean, rather than choosing to resort to CGI, Howard used a model of the command module, equipped with real parachutes, and dropped it from a helicopter. Robert Legato commented, “People try to talk you out of it because it’s too simple to work; it’s too easy” (Apollo 13 DVD). The crew still had to build a rig beneath the helicopter to attach the command module model, but even this ended up being less work (and looked more authentic) than using CGI. 

The re-entry scene from Apollo 13. For the splashdown, Howard refrains from using CGI, and instead uses a model of the command module and drops it from a helicopter. 

In conclusion, with Apollo 13, Ron Howard was able to successfully recreate one of the toughest, but proudest days in American history. Deemed a “successful failure," the Apollo 13 mission was a mission of human triumph over failed machinery. Howard’s smooth direction, combined with solid performances from the lead actors and a sweeping score from James Horner, makes Apollo 13 an elite historical space drama.



WORKS CITED

Apollo 13. Screenplay by William Broyles Jr and Al Reinert. Dir. Ron Howard. Special
            Edition DVD. Universal Pictures, 1995.