Fred Astaire
Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick both owe a debt to this musical number. Director Stanley Donen achieved this legendary effect by building the hotel room set inside a rotating barrel. The camera and the operator were bolted to the floor, rotating along with the furniture. To the viewer, the room looks stable. But in reality, the entire set was spinning. Fred Astaire wasn't defying gravity; he was just reacting to the floor becoming the wall. This exact same technique—the "rotating set"—was later used to create the centrifuge scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the hallway fight in Inception. It proves that action movies learned their best tricks from musicals. Fred Astaire was 51 years old when he filmed this, and the physical strain was immense because he had to constantly adjust his balance as the "down" direction changed every few seconds. The song "You're All the World to Me" was written by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner. The set was sometimes called a "squirrel cage" by the crew.