Russia has completed the selection of the cast for the world’s first space movie that it will send to the International Space Station (ISS) for the shoot. Race to film first space movie is now real, Russia signals its intention to beat Tom Cruise who is in planning to shoot a movie in space.
On Thursday, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that it will cast Russian actor Yulia Peresild as the lead in their first space-produced film “Challenge” and filmmaker Klim Shipenko will direct the movie.
Film production is set to begin on October 5, 2021. On the other hand, American actor Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman are also expected to reach the ISS to shoot the first Hollywood movie in space. The Hollywood team will be working with American space companies, Space X and NASA.
The exact date of Hollywood’s spacecraft to the ISS has yet not revealed. Tom Cruise who will be 59 at the time of the mission to low Earth orbit is backed by both NASA and Elon Musk.
Space-related movies often use zero-gravity flights to create space type environment, like in Apollo 13. While no film was ever shot in space, the movie’s cast that will arrive in ISS will undergo rigorous training to ensure they can complete the task.
“Among other things, they will have to take centrifuge tests, vibration stand tests, perform introductory and training flights on a zero-gravity plane, undergo parachute training, said Roscosmos in a statement.
Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia’s Channel One working with Roscosmos for the movie said last year that the film won’t be science fiction but a conceptual film of space travel in near future.
“It’s a movie about how a person in no way connected with space exploration, due to various reasons and personal debt, ends up a month later in orbit, that’s all I can tell you,” Ernst said in a September 2020 interview.