Interstellar

Blaine: After the experience with "The Dark Knight Rises" was over, I thought "That was spectacular! What's next for Christopher Nolan?” Then in early 2013 I got my answer. It's a very smart story thats foundations are rooted in real science thanks to the involvement of renowned astrophysicist, Kip Throne. Christopher Nolan said the idea of “Interstellar” that basically tries to explain or imagine the next step in human evolution, which is that Earth is the birds nest and you have to leave the nest he thought was an exciting idea for a movie.

Plot

Earth is dying and humanity is doing whatever it can to survive. Cooper is a former NASA pilot and he misses the good times. Cooper’s daughter, Murph, looks up to him and is the only person he can talk to about space travel. Humanity only cares about the things it really needs and things like space travel aren’t that important. Cooper and Murph manage to find a secret NASA base. NASA is planning a mission to send a team out into space and find a new home for humanity. Cooper volunteers for the mission, but Murph doesn’t want him to go. Cooper promises Murph that he’ll return, but she’ll be at an adult age by the time he gets back because time works different in space compared to Earth. Cooper’s team goes through a black hole where there are other planets on the other side.

Blaine: Some directors like to do things the old fashioned way and not have all the effects digital. When I saw the first trailer for “Interstellar" and saw the ship, I was thinking of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and I remember sometime after that Chris did mention at Comic-Con 2014 that “2001” and “Star Wars” are what influenced him the most for making a movie like this. Chris likes things to be as real as they can in his movies and for “Interstellar” they built miniature models of the ships and built huge scales of them as well. There is no green or blue screen in this film, but there is a background that is black. And then other backgrounds would be these painted backgrounds that are so life like and detailed and they would be for the sets of the inside of the space ship when Cooper is looking out the window and is seeing planet Earth grow further and further away as the ship moves deeper into space. They would do computer-generated spacecraft for distant views that they couldn’t get the miniature models to do. For the dust storms they used giant fans and the dust itself is a very safe product that’s used as filler in food, but it really looks like thick dust.

For the lead, Nolan had Matthew McConaughey in mind after he saw him in an early screening of “Mud”. I was already impressed with Matthew’s performance after the first hour, when he was getting emotional and breaking into tears as he was watching the footage of his children as adults. Christopher was also reunited with Anne Hathaway after she played Selena Kyle in “The Dark Knight Rises”. She was fascinated with the script and was all in favor of working with Matthew McConaughey. Matt Damon got to be apart of this movie just around the time I was thinking he should work with Chris Nolan. Matt’s role was small, but he was in it as one of the first astronauts who’s mission was to find a new home for humanity.

I like Jessica Chastain because she’s a talented actress and I really wanted her to work with Chris Nolan as well. Jessica thought of Christopher Nolan as an intelligent men and she didn’t want to do anything to disappoint him as he was directing her. One month before “Interstellar” was released, I discovered that Jessica was playing Murph at an adult age. My guess was that time slows down when you’re in space and James told me Einstein’s theory of relativity is that the faster you go into space, the more time slows down for you. He also said that in a black hole because of the immense gravity it also affects time/space. The closer you get to the center, the more time slows down. Mackenzie Foy never read the script, just the scenes with her character because she wanted to be surprised at what she saw when the film was completed. Even though Mackenzie didn’t read the script, she still understood the character of who she is and how she is feeling with her dad leaving. She has a great relationship with her father in real life and she used that when she was acting with Matthew McConaughey.

Christopher Nolan’s films always have great ensembles and “Interstellar” has a cast of well known actors I know of, but some aren’t main actors like the rest. Chris has also been lucky enough to work with legendary actors like Morgan Freeman and “Interstellar” is the sixth movie Chris has gotten to work with Michael Caine. Ellen Burstyn has been added to that list after she played Murph when she is an elder.

Two robots go with the astronauts on their mission and Christopher Nolan’s inspiration for those robots, TARS and CASE, was that they should be a very, very functional piece of equipment and that they should be like a light stand or a tripod or a camera dolly. Chris asked himself if the robots should be CGI or build a robot that would be pupperteered to shoot and he decided it can be done both ways. The CGI would be for scenes that would be sort of impossible to be pupperteered. The robot, TARS, was puppeteered and voiced by Bill Irwin. Chris wanted a character actor for this role and the casting director for “Interstellar” suggested Bill Irwin by having Chris look at Bill’s stuff and he showed what Chris needed for the character. Bill would come into the special effects shop to see them while they were trying to figure out how to work the movement of the robot. The machine would have an attachment to Bill’s chest to keep it from falling forward and another attachment would be on the feet to move the middle piece of it and on the sides Bill would move it with his arms.

The locations they shot for “Interstellar” are very interesting places. Christopher Nolan likes to travel and have his movies explore new places. Both Miller’s planet and Mann’s planet in the film were both shot in Iceland. Chris had been to Iceland before when he shot “Batman Begins”, but he used different spots that he didn’t use in that film for “Interstellar”. Originally they went to Iceland to find the ice planet that is in the script and they ended up finding the water planet there as well. Through a map of Iceland they discovered there is a place that has these great deltas where the water goes across the black volcanic material into the sea. The water planet had to look very deep, but was quite shallow. They had to pave a road for 15 kilometers so to make it easier to get a lot of the camera equipment out there even though the sand underneath the water was very firm. They also had to bring in a huge crane to pick up and drop one of the spaceships. Wes Bentley said the water was colder than the air and they had to stand there all day in that water and there was no place to sit and the space suits the actors wore hadn’t negotiated with that weather before.

The glacier they shot for the ice planet was the best ice formations to portray the landscape that Christopher Nolan wanted. They could bring vehicles up onto it. A few years back a volcano had erupted and put a lot of ash on the glacier and Chris and his team were worried about that because they wanted it to be sort of a clean ice planet that is very white and blue. But they asked themselves if it would be ok to have this black dust marbleization of the ice. And it wasn’t till they saw it for themselves that they decided that maybe it should be more gritty and dirty. They also built these full sized sets onto the glacier and it’s amazing they were able to do that because one of them said it was pretty massive.

Dr. Mann’s pod has been on the Ice planet for twenty years and it had to look like it had been battered by ice storms. They had to dig into the glacier to put the pod in and then build the set, but they couldn’t just leave it there because anything the glacier touches the glacier melts or the ice can change three or four inches overnight. So they put in a piece of truss and bolted it into the floor. Then the next day the bolts were out. They were lucky that they didn’t have to disassemble the spaceships and just move them from the water to the glacier by loading them onto a flatbed. There were times where it got very windy and these gusts would come out of nowhere while they were trying to shoot on the glacier. So they would get as many shots as they could and then the gusts were starting to show too much strength and so the crew would then take shelter in the vehicles. Chris would be upset sitting back at the hotel when they had nothing else to do because of the wind while they were in Iceland. Chris and his team just wanted to get on with shooting. They shot the insert shots at a parking lot of Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon.

While they were shooting the fight scene with Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon there was an avalanche a few hundred meters away that made a really loud noise and everyone just paused and they asked the local guides if they should be worried about it and they said no. The actors and stunt men would practice those scenes on a stage in Los Angeles by jumping back up, the fight on the ice, the slide down the ice.

Chris and his team wanted the main ship of “Interstellar” to look something like the ISS (International Space Station) and look modular. He also wanted it to look like smaller parts have been flung up on different missions and in the zero gravity of low earth orbit they’ve been assembled into this somewhat more fragile shape than you could ever build on Earth and then lift off the Earth. Because of the strains and stress due to gravity. Then the circular shape came about as a result of long-term exposure of zero gravity. The ship would have to create artificial gravity for the bodies of the astronauts. Because if you spend years in zero gravity, your muscles will atrophy.

Wally Pfister has done the cinematography for seven of Christopher Nolan's movies, but he couldn’t do “Interstellar” because he took on a directing job for another sci-fi feature, “Transcendence”. Chris was able to find another great cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema (Let the Right One In and Her). What I like the most about the cinematography in “Interstellar” is the camera positions, especially on the sets of the Endurance ship.

While shooting the ships in the special effects department they were mounted on a motion-controlled movement base and Chris would operate the huge scales of the ships like a steering wheel. I’m a big fan of models and what I love the most about them is how detailed they look and what Chris wanted to do is use techniques that would be timeless where they would create visual-effects shots that will stand up to scrutiny in the future. They used motion-control photography to shoot the models and motion-control is a process where the camera is mounted on a big computer controlled crane, so you can control it’s movements. It took a very long time to get the lighting and exposure set up because the lighting had to be realistic for the distant sun and the glow of the black hole.

Cooper falls into something called a tesseract, which shows him pieces of Murph’s time. The tesseract is really impressive because it’s both a set and a visual effect. Christopher Nolan said it was a considerable set that needed to be built, that took a long time. Chris said that the tesseract is based on the concept of suppressing a spatial dimension and substituting time for one of the spatial dimensions creating an array that can display time as a spatial dimension. A tesseract has also been described as a three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional hypercube that’s been unfolded. Christopher Nolan’s team actually built a big set with furniture objects and windows of Murph’s room on wires and standing on long pedestals. The art department built these spectrums as the element spectra that are what the tesseract is made of. The walls would have these hand made spectrums that would stretch around the book shelf tesseract set that would look like strands of yarn. And then the last few weeks they had projections as the spectrums. Matthew McConaughey and his stunt double would be on a wire floating around the box.

It is sad that Cooper had to see his daughter at an old age, especially when she’s dying. That’s what makes “Interstellar” feel so serious and dramatic is that even though you stay the same age, the people you love are aging and dying. But it is nice that he at least got to see her than never seeing her again, like it would be really sad that Cooper would return and find out Murph is dead. And even though she is dying, still she is happy to see the person who she has been wanting to see for the past 60 or 70 years. Cooper likes Amelia Brand and “Interstellar” doesn’t show a love story, but I think Amelia really likes Cooper after getting to know him and seeing how much he cares for his family. When the characters are trying to get back to Earth, Cooper stays behind while Amelia goes through the worm hole to try and return home. Both Cooper and Amelia are all that’s left of the mission along with the robots, TARS and CASE, and they need each other. “Interstellar” ends with Cooper getting a new mission and that is to find Amelia. I’d like to think that Cooper is reunited with Amelia and begins a new life with her.

My rating on “Interstellar” is five out of five stars.

Music by Hans Zimmer