Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity has received high praise from early viewers, but it's nearly as impressive that the film was made at all. Cuarón has frequently spoken of the technical difficulties of working in simulated zero-gravity, and the trouble keeping the movie afloat as it ran up against the constraints of its studio budget. Vulture paints the director's life as a similarly unpredictable success, from his early expulsion from a Mexico City film school to his eclectic catalog and struggles to rewrite the language of film. "I'm very pleased," he says of Gravity. "We got away with it. That's the thing. It's a very unlikely film, first of all, to put together. It's basically one character floating in space."