While speaking with SciFiNow, “Moonfall” star Patrick Wilson talked about when you’re working with a movie that’s shooting primarily against green screen backgrounds, you kind of have to trust Captain Emmerich to know what he’s doing. “You give yourself over to the vision of the director [during those scenes] and the art department and the VFX department,” says Wilson. Acting against nothing even gave Halle Berry room to stretch her acting chops:
“What you see on screen is nothing of what we saw. We were actors sitting in a little tiny cockpit, looking out our window, seeing blue and green […] So I take away with me, the understanding that I’m capable of doing that, and I challenged myself in a new way.”
When you have a visual effects-heavy project like “Moonfall,” the actors aren’t exactly going to be spending a lot of time filming in an actual disaster. Unless your name is Tom Cruise, the chances of an actor actually filming their scenes in the vacuum of space is not going to happen. It’s the nature of working with green screens, which has trained generations of performers to work opposite nothing. You may have some indicators of what you’re looking at, but it usually won’t be until the film comes out that you get to see what it looks like. I don’t even know how you prepare an Academy Award-winning actress for the madness that transpires in the film’s second half anyways.
“Moonfall” is currently streaming on HBO Max.