Its locations were hard-earned its special-effects plan was largely reconceived during production one man lost part of an ear on the set, another lost his life. None other than Christopher Nolan has called it “an almost perfect movie.” “Phil really pulled it off,” George Lucas says. Its dialog has become a go-to signifier of human accomplishment director Rian Johnson celebrated landing his Star Wars gig by tweeting a clip from the movie. (Kaufman calls it “the longest movie ever made without a plot.”) But it introduced an entire cinematic genre, what Quentin Tarantino has called the “hip epic,” inspiring everyone from Michael Bay to James Cameron, who hired its cinematographer for Titanic. With its three-hour-plus run time and unconventional structure, the film-which tells the story of test pilots like Chuck Yeager and Gordon Cooper as they break the sound barrier and launch toward the exosphere-was almost as daring as its subject. In Kaufman's hands, however, spaceflight became a far more human pursuit-a story not of external threats but inner resolve. Before writer-director Philip Kaufman brought Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff to the big screen in 1983, onscreen astronauts were little more than alien quarry or asteroid bait.
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