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Interstellar - Behind the Scenes
Interstellar: an excellent, beautiful sci-fi movie. How could it not have interesting behind the scenes aspects? Since almost every scene seems to be Nolan’s attempt to show that he is, in fact, a god, there are many behind the scenes videos I found. I want to start by talking about the tesseract. That scene near the end when Matthew Mcconaughey is communicating with his daughter using gravity through space and time. The physical representation of spacetime is stunning, and of course, it took a hell of a lot of work to get made. While it was enhanced and given motion with CGI, the crew still built the thing. Nolan and the set designers spent months working with different ways to visualize four dimensional spacetime. Movement around the set was done with wires, which were set up even before the movement had been mapped out.
In a film about an interstellar journey, it's easy to overlook the portions taking place on Earth. But work still had to be put into that. In fact, to me it seems harder to work on these shots because you can’t control the environment as you could in a studio. One thing that stood out to me in one of the videos I watched was when Nolan said that Earth in the movie couldn’t be a simple dystopia, that it had to be beautiful and nostalgic for there to be an emotional weight to leaving it. In order to accomplish this Nolan filmed outside of Calgary in Canada. This area has a long tradition of being used in westerns due to its absolutely beautiful landscape. Since it was too hard to find a farmhouse to use, they built an actual farmhouse. They also had to grow corn in the region, because corn isn’t really found in mountainous regions. This shouldn’t have worked, it was a terrible region to grow corn. They just got lucky. For the scene where Cooper drives through the corn chasing the drone, the production crew had a helicopter above calling out directions to the stunt driver, who couldn’t see anything because of all the corn.
Since this is a sci-fi epic, who would I be if I didn’t talk about the spaceships. While nowadays most spaceships in movies are computer generated, Nolan opted to build models. In the case of the Endurance (the space station) it is 1/15th scale miniature. In the case of the Ranger (the shuttle) it is a life size model. They built the Ranger so it could be controlled in real time with a little triangle shaped steering wheel sort of thing, which makes its movements more exact and organic, especially during all of the docking sequences. For the Endurance, they only ever used one light source on it to simulate the sun. To account for the darkness, the shutter speed was extremely low, sometimes taking 5 seconds for a single frame. The camera passes using the motion control camera rig they had were also very slow. Due to these two factors, shots of the Endurance took hours, even if it was just the camera passing over. They only averaged a handful of shots a day. For the scenes where the Endurance breaks up, they had a larger pyrotechnic model that was shot at 72 frames per second to capture more detail. While this model method seems very slow, the end product is definitely worth it, as Interstellar is one of the best looking movies ever.
