THOMAS: The beginning of the movie, the part that takes place on Earth...
...is a really interesting piece of the movie for me...
...because it's idyllic, but at the same time...
...you know, things are clearly going wrong.
And I think that it really reminds you what is so amazing about this Earth...
...the beauty of our surroundings, the nurturing.
NOLAN: I think the Americana of the world in which the film is set...
...the idea of this bucolic setting...
...this kind of notion of a simpler way of life that we often hark back to...
...was a very important part of Jonah's thinking...
...in terms of not wanting to portray a dystopian world.
Not wanting to make it easy, in a sense...
...because if the world had been presented as unlivable fundamentally and unappealing...
...then leaving the Earth doesn't carry the same emotional resonance.
Well, first of all, the set where the farm is-- Has been built is just magnificently beautiful.
And I was driving in there and I was thinking...
...a lot of movies that are set in, you know, Midwest: Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas a bit.
And in my mind I always think...
...of that part of the country as looking like what I see in those movies.
But really, that's Alberta, Canada.
Those parts of our country don't look exactly like that.
A lot of the great Westerns were shot outside Calgary.
Things like Unforgiven, the first Superman that Dick Donner did was-- The film was shot there.
And one of the reasons is it has, um, these sort of gentle rolling hills...
...and then mountains in the background. So there's a very grand landscape to it.
It's really an ideal place to get that kind of beautiful vista that we wanted.
The farmhouse is such an important character in the film.
I mean, it's just such a key component...
...that, you know, the chances of finding a building that's existing...
...that you're gonna be happy with to fit that slot in the right landscape...
...that's pretty long odds.
So fairly early on I think we decided that we would find the right landscape...
...and then, you know, build what we needed to build in terms of what the house would be.
If it's just a farmhouse surrounded by corn, it's gonna get a bit boring.
So having this sort of drop of the land and the ravine in the mountains...
...you know, all these great, different sides that we could have with this house...
...it all worked out perfectly.
We went there earlier when Nathan was placing the house because we wanted--
We wanted to define how to place the house in the landscaping.
We stood there, literally, with a model of the house...
...and sort of looked through it and tried to find nice lighting...
...because, you know, the sun goes up there and it goes down there.
We're gonna shoot most of the day, we're going to shoot here.
These are probably the most important rooms.
We spend so much of the film in the farmhouse.
It would be silly not to build it.
And we wanted an interior/exterior build, so we had real windows with real views.
And we could determine what those views are...
...and we get this inside/outside relationship...
...which is, I think, is sort of essential for this kind of movie.
Nicest thing was when the house was there, we would go there...
...and Chris would go in and he'd walk through a room...
...and he would not take out viewfinders straightaway.
He would first make sure...
...that the house felt like a real place that people could live in and so on.
NOLAN: Other than being very influenced by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth...
...Christina's World, things like that, there's certain aspects of the farmhouse...
...just in terms of tone and color and texture...
...that were put into it for those aesthetic reasons...
...but it was actually built in a very practical way.
And we felt like it had been laid out according to the demands of that landscape...
...and the people who would be farming there and it had a good sense of history.
It was a nice place to be, actually.
Sometimes as a screenwriter you feel unbelievably irresponsible.
And I went out to visit the set outside of Calgary.
But I remember driving on a road that they had made out of wood chips...
...for several miles and it took a while. I was surrounded by corn everywhere.
And I'm just thinking to myself, "This just feels like an odd place to have corn."
I asked someone about it and they said, "Of course there's no corn here.
The corn is all here because of the script."
We were looking for two things that don't exist so easily in nature.
And it's written in the script quite casually, it seems very normal.
But it was basically mountains in the distance with corn growing.
CROWLEY: We've been looking at photos of Alberta and the rolling hills...
...leading up to the Canadian Rockies.
And we went to see the Department of Agriculture...
...you know, to sit with the technical guys...
...who'd tell us where you grow corn...
...and why you grow corn and how.
And their opinion was, "Well, you know, it would probably fail."
We really wanted to get some sense that this corn was being farmed...
...somewhere that it probably shouldn't be.
Indeed, they don't farm a lot of corn where we were filming in Calgary...
...because the wind out of the mountains could kill it very easily.
MYERS: So we were looking in that area...
...and we found, through the Film Commission...
...and through some research, one farmer that was off the grid...
...a little bit closer to the Canadian Rockies.
You grow corn here, you're living on the edge. This'd be--
As I said to them, this is kind of on the edge of common sense.
I mean, if you get this far north and at this altitude--
It's 4100 feet right where we're standing.
That's pretty high and pretty far north to grow corn.
We've never grown corn here. Nobody has out here.
We seeded it May 10th.
July 8th it was just barely knee-high. I said, "This ain't gonna work, boys."
I remember when we came there the first time after it was planted...
...and we all had--
We had an idea of how high we wanted this corn to be.
But it was not that high at all.
We were like, "Oh, my God. Well, this is--
This doesn't look like a cornfield at all."
Thank God, strangely enough, corn grows very fast.
And by the moment we started shooting, it started reaching the perfect height.
We spent some time shooting in the house, so it gave us more time.
We came out there and it was miraculous how quickly it grew in the last couple of weeks.
Then the longer we stayed there, obviously, the better it got.
And it grew really quickly.
SEARS: One thing about corn, when does it warm up, it grows quick.
I think it's about 7-feet tall.
We have 350 acres.
At another, uh, location, we have another 500 acres.
You know, when you look at it and its scale, it's quite huge.
It's an Indian surveillance drone.
The chase through the corn was always gonna be tricky for us.
When you talk about a car driving through corn--
I mean, these cornstalks aren't 3 or 4 feet.
I mean, they're 7, 8, 9, even 10 feet in places.
So we knew from an early point that visibility was gonna be a problem.
So, then, when Craig Hosking came on board and he was the helicopter pilot.
We did some very early tests with him...
...and we found that the best place to call all of this action was from the helicopter.
So we would literally pick a route. We would tell the stunt guy in the car...
...who would be on open radio with Craig in the helicopter.
We'd call "action," and Craig would literally tell him:
"Left, left, left. Right, right, right. Stop." And that was how we did it.
FISHER: The whole drone was basically a giant model airplane.
A professional RC pilot did all the piloting on set.
It was challenging, you know.
To find an area where he could take off, then get into a real helicopter...
...transport him to the set while he was flying it...
...he would get out, continue flying it, interact with the vehicles...
...get back into the helicopter and land it...
...and then try to cycle it and do it again.
Doing this stuff practical, it's a lot of work. But it's pretty exhilarating to do those things.
- Felt like the right lens too. - Yeah.
Nice work. Thank you very much. Worked well.
For the actor, what's around you informs everything you do.
So the more it can be real, the better.
They don't make a lot of films like this anymore.
Cornfield was on fire in the background, and we were in the foreground...
- ...I felt like I was in Gone With the Wind. - ONDREJKO: I brought up to Christopher:
"You know, Christopher, uh, green corn doesn't burn."
And he was like, "Um...
Well, in our movie it does."
And I went, "Oh, okay. So how's that gonna happen ?"
The fire consisted of two things: Propane for the flame...
...and then we burned diesel for the smoke.
Out in the cornfields were kind of good.
We could hide 10 1500-gallon propane tanks.
And then we had diesel tanks that were about 500 gallons apiece.
Those were placed kind of by each of the propane tanks...
...we plumbed the smoke over with the fire.
[MAN SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY]
FISHER: The part where they're battling the fire, they're a lot closer--
Several times we did it in a distance, and then it was getting closer.
We kept moving our whole setup a little closer.
When you get it on that scale, there's a lot of heat generated.
There were stunt people and actors that were interacting with it and working closer.
Obviously, we could turn it off in between takes and it could cool down.
It's not like fighting a real fire. But when it's going, it generates a lot of heat.
We've made a strange deal. We got involved in the corn business.
Basically, we invested in the crop...
...and if all the corn was lost, then we would never get our money back.
But if we sold it, or used it as silage, then it was free.
Which, at the end of the day, we ended up making all of it back...
...because the crop did pretty well.