Daily Dialogue — January 21, 2013

JIM LOVELL: … Something bad might happen. Stars will fall down on you or something.
JEFFREY LOVELL: That’s silly. Stars can’t fall on us.
JIM LOVELL: Oh, you are a smarter kid than I was.
JEFFREY LOVELL: How long will it take you to get to the Moon?
JIM LOVELL: Four days… But that’s pretty fast, you see. This is the Saturn IVB booster, and it shoots us away from the Earth — pshhh… It’s fast, as a bullet from a gun. Until the Moon’s gravity actually grabs us and pulls us into a circle around the Moon, which is called an orbit. All right? Fred and I float down the tunnel into this guy — the lunar module. This is a spidery-looking guy. Only holds two people. And it’s just for landing on the Moon. And I take the controls, and I steer it around, and I fly it down, adjusting it here, the attitude there, pitch, roll, for a nice soft landing on the Moon. Better than Neil Armstrong. Way better than Pete Conrad.
JEFFREY LOVELL: Dad… Did you know the astronauts in the fire?
JIM LOVELL: Yeah, yeah I did. I knew the astronauts in the fire, all of ‘em.
JEFFREY LOVELL: Could that happen again?
JIM LOVELL: Well, I’ll tell something about that fire. Um… A lota things went wrong…The door; it’s called a hatch. They couldn’t get it open when they needed to get out. That was one thing… And a… Well, a lot of things went wrong in that fire.
JEFFREY LOVELL: Did they fix it?
JIM LOVELL: Oh, yes. Absolutely. We fixed it. It’s not a problem anymore.

— Apollo 13 (1995), screenplay by William Broyles Jr. & Al Reinert, based on a book by 
Jim Lovell & Jeffrey Kluger

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=c9vph

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is answering children’s questions, suggested by @BillieJeanVK. Today’s suggestion by Teddy Pasternak.

Trivia: In interviews, the real Jim Lovell had said that he thought Kevin Costner looked a little bit like him, but Costner was never cast. When Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment got the rights to the script, Ron Howard signed on to direct and knowing that Tom Hanks was an Apollo/space buff, sent the script to him. They set a meeting and Hanks agreed to play Jim Lovell during Hanks’ and Howard’s first meeting about the film.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Excellent commentary from Teddy: “A nice piece of exposition here disguised as an answer to a kid’s question with Jim explaining how the mission is supposed to go down. Plus, a nice ending to this short scene foreshadowing the accident with the line “It’s not a problem anymore.” and the shot of Marilyn in the doorway looking worried. That shot may have been too much if we didn’t already know what was about to happen, but in a movie based on a historical event like this you have to assume that the audience already know the major plot points and you can exploit the characters’ reactions in order to bring in some emotion to the scene without the risk of giving away something you shouldn’t.

We experience this scene through Marilyn’s POV — from hearing the conversation from the bedroom, to seeing Jim and Jeffrey through the doorway (notice the framing and placement of the camera at her height), to ending with a shot of her reacting to what we just heard — thus connecting on an emotional level with the events through a character on screen. It brings us into the drama as we feel we’re experiencing it first hand.”