I'm the co-writer and director of 'Ad Astra.'

We had thought for a while about what the moon might

be like in the next 50 to 100 years

and what it would take to settle the moon

and how we probably wouldn't be able to settle

the moon in certain parts.

So we tried to conceive of a sequence, which illustrated

the chaos of what it might mean to adhere to treaties

about certain parts you couldn't go to the moon,

and if that would mean lunar pirates.

Probably, it would.

And so we created an action scene around that concept.

The goal for the scene was really twofold, I'll say.

One was to have it play as a very subjective experience--

the strangeness of being on the moon

to sell the kind of one-sixth gravitational pull,

but also to illustrate what it means when there's

a total lack of order.

And that was really the ambition."

"Roy?"

"Yes, Colonel."

"Look at this, the big blue marble.

It never ceases to amaze me."

"But it was really our attempt to extrapolate, to think about

essentially what it would mean to settle territory

and who gets to own what.

And that has never resolved itself

peacefully in the entire history of the human race.

So why it would be different on the moon?

We have no idea."

"Lieutenant, you clocking this?"

"In an ordinary action sequence,

the issues are how to shoot a stunt safely

and superbly with a lot of impact.

But this represented some very weird, difficult challenges,

one of which was how to simulate

one/sixth gravitational pull.

Additionally, how to make sure that it looked like the moon.

So my first idea, which of course is always wrong,

was we're going to shoot in the desert.

And we will then figure out a way to color time

the sky that's blue, a jet black.

And then we'll take the color out of the sand,

and we've got it.

Well, what we wound up doing was shooting

the sequence in the desert.

And it presented huge and almost impossible

logistical challenges.

The first was, of course, well,

the desert does have life.

So all of the surfaces turned out to be useless.

The second was that the sky, sometimes had clouds

and sometimes had gradations.

So even though we shot it in part

with an infrared camera, which would turn the blue to black,

it still didn't turn it all the way black.

So the sequence had to be almost like visual effects,

heavily augmenting the practical stunts that we did.

And then, of course, there was the attempt

to simulate one-sixth gravity.

And that was a lengthy trial where

we experimented the different frame rates for the film.

And ultimately, we decided between 32 and 36 frames

per second as opposed to the usual 24 frames

per second simulated for some reason

what our experiences of what one-sixth gravity would look

like.

And may I say that the strange fact of the scene

is that when we had to replace all of the surface

and get rid of the desert, get rid of the vegetation,

we found ourselves using the very high-quality Hasselblad

photographs that were taken on the moon in the Apollo

missions. With a computer.

And you cut out around the wheels,

and you cut around the shape of the Rover itself.

And you replace the ground.

And the replacement background was the photographs

of the moon that were taken over a 20 to 30 year period.

And so when they're driving, what's

zooming past the wheels is a series of lunar photographs.

And so the actual surface you're seeing

is the lunar surface."

[HEAVY BREATHING]