NOLAN: I always referred to TARS and CASE as articulating machines...
...rather than robots because to me the idea of a robot...
...is, you know, a machine that's impersonating a human being.
These are purely machines. They have personality, intelligence.
The physicality of the thing can be completely unrelated to that...
...in a way that no creature that's ever come along before...
...has been able to be, you know, that separate terms of the mind from the body.
I thought it would be fascinating to explore this question of...
...what if the most human characters on the ship were the non-human ones ?
So we started with idea that these robots would have been developed in a time of war.
But I found something incredibly poignant to me...
...about the idea that they would be just as marooned...
...in the moment we find them as well as anyone else.
They're literally military surplus and they've just been abandoned.
NOLAN: We made them ex-military...
...because you're looking for a reason for there to be robots.
No one's gonna build a robot for the hell of it.
And so their military background is simply the reason they exist in the first place...
...is they would've only been built for something like that.
But then in a design sense that leads you towards something extremely strong...
...impregnable, blast-resistant.
My inspiration was...
...it should be a very, very functional piece of equipment.
It should be, you know, like, a light stand or a tripod or something or a camera dolly.
You know, it should just be a thing.
It shouldn't be something that the designers have, in any way, attempted to make--
Look like something, let alone a person.
What we wound up doing...
...was going with the absolute minimalist approach to that.
What we sort of jokingly termed as like kind of robot, like Mies van der Rohe design.
Just pure, you know, function over form, so it's just a big block.
And the block is divided into smaller blocks, subdivided into smaller blocks.
All with the same proportions as the original block.
And, really, what we wanted to do was unfold the design.
I mean, literally, in some ways, over the course of the film...
...so that you'd see more of the functionality through the film.
I had a mold shop up and running, it was like, "Let's start with a box.
I brought in the model maker and we started playing with earth magnets...
...and how we could take these divisions and unravel them and roll them...
...and TARS started to appear.
There's very often a divide in visual effects when you approach a character...
...who's going to have a computer graphics component.
You say, "Okay," you either do the whole thing CG...
...or you do the whole thing with some kind of build-on-set if it's a robot.
MAN: Action.
NOLAN: Very early on, it seemed to me that quite obviously...
...it should be something in between...
...where, you know, you have something that you can you puppeteer on set...
...and then you remove the puppeteer through relatively simple visual effects.
Using more elaborate visual effects...
...you have a CG version that you do for the things that couldn't be puppeteered.
Chris and Nathan had the idea that everything had kind of been done in the CG world...
...of robots.
So we wanted to keep the robots reality-based...
...something that they could theoretically do.
They got stuck with the problem, making this whole thing walk...
...and move and...
It was a difficult piece of puppeteering.
What I was looking for was somebody to take on the job...
...of giving life and personality...
...to what is essentially, you know, an inanimate object.
And John Papsidera, our casting director, had me look at Bill's stuff...
...and immediately used to say, "Okay, this is what we need.
Somebody that's a great actor but is also a clown."
You know, this kind of guy who can-- You know, who can take a stepladder...
...and make it dance around.
And that was exactly the challenge here...
...is for him to take something that is inherently restrictive and clunky...
...and lacks all modes of expression and try and give it personality...
...through its most basic restrictive movements.
IRWIN: There was a conversation with Chris Nolan...
...where he sort of described these characters which he referred to as machines.
He was shying away from the word "robot," as I recall.
He described them as articulated planks.
Bill was very involved right from the beginning in preproduction...
...when we were figuring out the practicalities of what the robot was gonna be on set.
It was very much created with him as a part of the process.
Then there was my first visit to the Special Effects shop...
...where they were madly building the first prototype machine...
...and figuring out how it would work.
It seems a little tricky but not that bad because we were working with a cable system...
...where you'd squeeze cables and that would lift the machine up to give clearance.
Originally, it was a very lightweight aluminum structure.
Easy to move around and pose.
As they determined or as they decided on the actual outside look of TARS...
...they picked stainless steel.
Unfortunately, no way to make stainless steel light.
So now the TARS that we had was about 70 pounds heavier.
It got up into just a hair under 200 pounds.
IRWIN: And as they got heavier with the machine...
...pretty soon the cable system wasn't gonna work because you couldn't lift it anymore.
So the Special Effects shop geniuses had created...
...a compressed air system, so now it's like a video game.
And that's lifting it and allowing you to manipulate it.
It was great having Bill Irwin and getting his feedback on what he could do...
...and then we had another stunt guy that worked with him, Mark Fichera.
Basically, with our chest, we keep the machine from falling forward...
...and with our feet, we're pushing.
So it's always counterbalancing, and push and pull and--
In order to make it not wobble, you actually have to absorb all the machine...
...so you're kind of bending your legs the whole time.
Each thing was kind of a challenge...
...even going up a little step or walking on different materials.
The Art Department supplied us with different pieces of flooring...
...that would be used in the spaceships for later on.
Because some stuff worked and some stuff didn't.
Again, it was all gonna be kind of operated by the actor himself...
...so it had to be user-friendly.
Because of their design, they were limited to what each one could kind of do.
So we had to kind of-- We almost had to build a robot...
...for each gag, almost, besides the walkers.
FRANKLIN: Initially, when I read the script, I thought:
"Well, you know, a lot of this is gonna be down to us." But the reality...
...was that, uh, most of it was down to the physical puppets.
Where visual effects came in is where we needed the robots to do extraordinary things.
There's the scene on the water planet...
...and the robot turned into a giant sort of water wheel...
...and thrashes off through the water to go and rescue Dr. Brand...
...and then it picks her up and runs back through the water.
Again, Special Effects built some pretty cool rigs.
They built this little all-terrain vehicle, quad bike.
And they gave it really skinny wheels...
...that allowed it to cut through the water a little bit faster.
And then this thing had a rig on the front of it which churned up the water...
...to give us the movement created by CASES' legs as he gallops through the water.
And then it had arms sticking off it and it could carry Brand's stunt double, Alicia.
And then what we did is we had to paint out all of this...
...and keep Alicia and the arms that are churning water.
And add a computer-animated robot.
That was pretty cool to animate those things.
Bill Irwin has the toughest job of all of us actors on this set.
GYASI: We'll all be in our astronaut uniforms...
...and Bill is dressed in all gray.
There are times where you kind of forget about him because he's in a corner behind TARS.
And I think for him who's such-- He's such a loving man...
...and, like, yearns to connect with people...
...having that discipline of him sort of being on the fringe...
...I think that emotion that TARS feels of not quite being human and being robot...
...just emanates even when he's not speaking. It's just there.
I found it very intriguing to try and make something...
...very human out of my one relationship with the one machine on board.
In a way he's my best bud on the ship.
And there's an interesting dynamic to be played with there.
We just tried to make it a little more personal along the way.
Matthew McConaughey started relating immediately to this machine...
...as if he were a partner. Called me Slick.
"Hey, Slick."
TARS and CASE, different functions to different characters in the story.
So CASE, at least as I've been imagining him, is a softer...
...a little less experienced robot pilot.
TARS is developed to be this kind of grizzled, hardened, middle-level officer...
...ex-Marine possibly, with an ex-Marine sense of humor.
Bill brought so much life and personality...
...and such a lovable quality to TARS...
...and he really made each one of the characters specific.
You knew when you were talking to CASE and you knew when you were talking to TARS.
I don't know what the physical challenge for Bill was like...
...but he always brought a smile to his work every day.
It's been a gig where just about every aspect...
...of the acting craft I've ever had has come into play.
For a physical actor, the proposition was fascinating.