To add to the adventure and to lend authenticity to the film, director Jon Amiel paired his actors with appropriate advisors, including Caltech scientists. NASA astronauts, UCLA professors and military personnel.
D.J. Qualls, who portrays the computer genius "Rat," talked to a lot of hackers who’d been in jail and were now rehabilitated or working for the government. It was research that he found unexpectedly unnerving.
"I was looking at how these guys can manipulate computer data and it made me really afraid." says Qualls. "In fact, at one point, I felt like I didn’t want to know any more. I’d learned enough about their capabilities."
Each actor added personal touches to his or her role. For example, Aaron Eckhart and Delroy Lindo went to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where they observed scientists at work. Lindo also watched films of scientists doing research, and found that "it was really stimulating to be exposed to that world."
Alfre Woodard, who plays the head of Mission Control, a position never held by a woman, sat down and charted out how she might have actually risen to such a high position. "I spoke to a scientist about the aerospace industry and the NASA program." says Woodard, "and I learned how women rise in the ranks. In the end, I knew my character’s whole timeline -- where she was born, where she went to school, which job led to what position and how she managed in that world."
To play their roles of astronauts turned terranauts, Bruce Greenwood and Hilary Swank met with real-life astronauts Dr. Tom D. Jones and Colonel Susan Helms. Jones, now an aerospace consultant, writer and public speaker, who spent a total of 53 days in space. shared his flight experiences with Greenwood.
"It was very exciting. Tom showed me a video he took from space, and it was just fantastic," exclaims Greenwood. "Both astronauts were incredibly professional. In my eyes, all astronauts are true heroes."
Swank’s meeting with Helms, the astronaut who lived at the U.S. space station for about two months, was especially interesting because at one time Swank had considered a career in space.
"Before I wanted to be an actress, I wanted to be an astronaut," Swank confesses. "I would still like to go into space at some point. It seems very spiritual, bigger than all of us, and I think that’s something to always remember -- how small we really are in the whole scheme of things."
While the cast researched their roles, the design team rolled into action and found that creating the world of inner earth was a task with unlimited possibilities, yet oddly constrained by the expectations of the audience.
With this creative task, two issues emerged: past treatments of inner earth and limited knowledge among scientists about the earth’s core. Talking about the only other movie to tackle the subject of inner-earth travel, the 1959 "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Jon Amiel says, "Jules Verne envisioned a group of gentle folk in Victorian tweeds walking to the center of earth and finding a big lizard, a giant lake and the lost city of Atlantis! We had the advantage of an extra 150 years of scientific knowledge, so we tried to set the record straight. If you’re hoping for lost cities, I’m sorry, you’re going to be out of luck!"
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