NOLAN: We wanted the design of the ships to reflect the cutting edge of contemporary design.
But not be overly futurist in its design.
We took a very good look at the Endeavor.
Paid particular attention to the tiling on the outside, the heat shield, the way that works.
We also went down to Elon Musk's SpaceX and had a look at his capsule...
...and what those guys are doing there, how they put it together.
Learned a lot of valuable information.
And got a very good sense of what the textures of these ships...
...were gonna need to be like, both inside and outside.
CROWLEY: I guess we started as we normally do.
Other than trying to deal with the whole film, we take something in the film to warm up with.
The obvious thing was to take the Ranger, which is our sort of hero ship.
Try to design that and include some of our new methods.
I've been keen to test our 3D design using some new programs.
So we decided we were gonna...
...rather than sit around a table with parts, gluing them together...
...we decided we were gonna sit around a computer. Heh.
[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]
And he'd been working on just this sort of profile...
...of how he felt the Ranger should look if you sort of slice a section through it.
You know, it's a side view.
So we started by 3Ding shapes and 3D printing them, and testing them.
And I'd look at car design.
We'd look at lots of other industrial design elements.
I guess the Endeavor really influenced it...
...because we knew we had to be true to NASA and the look of NASA.
We wanted black on the bottom, for re-entry heat.
And we wanted white on the top.
Even though the shape isn't a shuttle shape, it's more like a sports car.
We found that shape we really loved and it was like...
...window details, are they set back ?
The tile break-up. The landing gear. Engines. Air locks.
You know, you try not to let that destroy the design.
We have our sort of permanent standing interior Ranger set.
And it's kind of hard to get in here because...
...again you've gotta come in through the air lock.
So this is where we discovered our language.
These things, like the shuttle, have been used for many years.
And they needed to have a worn, you know, used quality.
We realized we needed that complexity, and that really is achieved by...
...the different tones of material.
I mean, you've-- You're talking four different tones in one area.
And that also gives us depth between the lighter grays and the darker burgundies.
Some of our best instrument panels are up here.
And it was important to get these all lit and working.
We started to add detail like these flip-- Plexi-flip plates.
And we just started making it more and more complex to make it believable.
And adding laptops that could be stowed.
We had to add more lights in to get these seats lit.
So we were trying to fit lights everywhere.
VAN HOYTEMA: We literally had to design our lights...
...within the walls of the ships and of the vessels that we made.
You want to have lights in there that you can point your camera at and that feel very credible.
But at the same time, you want them to emit...
...the light you need to light up your scene.
NOLAN: Okay, rehearsing. Okay, ready ?
And action on the chairs.
When you come out into orbit, you'll pull your seats back--
That hydraulically go back and you can orbit Earth...
...or wherever you're going and your main view is out of the top windows.
When this seat rotates back, you've got working monitors for the back position.
So all this stuff relates to this seat when it's horizontal.
So you-- You know, you're connecting up here.
So when you come back here, he can work on these.
And when this guy comes back, the pilot, the whole console comes with him.
So then he can get to all of these switches.
FISHER: They had to do a computer-controlled move...
...to move from the one position to the next one.
And the two chairs actually interacted with each other...
...pass each other to get to that second position, so it all had to be programed.
The Ranger was the Ferrari and the Lander kind of became this sort of bulky machine.
Quite angular.
I always call it like a big old Russian airlift chopper...
...or Canadian cargo lift chopper. Because it's this workhorse.
We had four landing pods.
So you slot those out with your Lander and take them down to the planet.
And they became your camp.
This is our Lander.
You need to view all areas, so if you look down when you're landing this thing...
...and you're carrying a container underneath you...
...you need to be able to see pretty much 360.
And also when you're docking, because it docks--
The docking door is behind you...
...you need to be able to see the Endurance as you come up to it.
So we have windows everywhere on this thing.
Because there are so many windows, it's lit by the instrument panels.
And really, when we shoot this, you're in atmospheric a lot rather than space.
So you're getting a lot of natural light coming through this cockpit.
And then we realized we couldn't mount anything to the floor.
So that's when we decided to float the seats.
These things are gimbaled. So as this thing banks, they stay level.
You kind of move with it, and they're linked together which is kind of fun.
MAN 1: Chair test. MAN 2: And we'll see what these can do.
MAN 1: Let's give these things plenty of room, guys.
FISHER: It's all gonna be in camera.
You're gonna have the actors in there.
Everything has to work very safe and smoothly. Everyone has to be harnessed in.
So that's the sort of thought behind this ship.
We knew we had to get a move on because we needed to build the Ranger and the Lander.
So we could then put it in a 747 and fly it to Iceland.
We decided to hand-sculpt.
So we hired a couple of longtime Hollywood sculptors.
It's basically, like, taking a block of marble and creating a human sculpture out of it.
Working your way back into the foam.
They're not using hammer and chisels. They're using hotwires.
They slice through the foam and they find the shape.
It's very specialized work.
Probably very few people who can do that.
This steel frame will bolt together...
...so that we can disassemble all the parts.
And then reassemble them on set.
NOLAN: It was really a fun thing to build the ships for real...
...and be able to see them in the real environments.
Theoretically, they're somewhat under scale.
But, I mean, you actually see the actors climb out of one of them.
So they're not that under scale. They were pretty big.
The Lander was more of a cheat. So we didn't get too close to that one.
But the Ranger was a pretty fully developed, full-size spaceship.
To be able to photograph those in the real environment...
...sitting in the water, sitting on top of the ice, was a huge benefit to the film.
MYERS: Chris took the sets that went to Iceland...
...that were full-size or 80 percent, and we brought them back to the stages.
NOLAN: We shipped them back to Los Angeles for the studio shoot.
Not really knowing exactly what we were gonna do with them.
I asked Scott Fisher whether it would be possible to mount...
...the full-size Ranger, the full-size Lander on to these gimbal rigs.
Because my frustration with gimbal work has always been that...
...it's an incredibly violent and, you know, difficult environment to work on the inside.
And it doesn't really read very well on camera, at all.
We get a couple of shots where you get extreme movement.
But most of the time, because of the way a camera works within an environment...
...you might as well be shaking the camera.
You're not really doing much with this gimbal, that's extremely time consuming and difficult.
But when you look at it from the outside, it's extraordinary.
You can maneuver in the most amazing ways with this little controller...
...that has the pistons built as a miniature of the large pistons that are right there.
So you can move the thing around and produce all kinds of extraordinary motions.
FISHER: Chris, he really, I think, enjoyed doing that.
Whenever we had the motion base out he controlled it most of the time himself...
...because he's the one that knows what it should be doing.
MAN: Three, two--
FISHER: Then we could record those and play them back several times...
...if multiple takes were needed.
That movement was working well though. Let's play that back one more time.
NOLAN: We wanted to use a lot of hard mounts on the ships.
Really treating an IMAX camera like a GoPro camera.
We put a lot of effort in trying to get that same kind of feeling...
...that you have when you would mount a GoPro.
So you have, all the time, this very close feeling of your camera's there witnessing something...
...rather than there's a camera somewhere hovering through space...
...like an all-seeing eye seeing the situation.
You're really there. You're really there in ways that you maybe recognize...
...from real life when you look at footage from the ISS or in the shuttle.
NOLAN: Having those foregrounds be full-size as opposed to miniatures or CG...
...which immediately give you a hefty amount of credibility within the frame...
...something that's really real. The heart of each shot.
The texture of a full-size piece is much, much tighter...
...than you would get in a small-scale miniature even though miniatures work very well.
NOLAN: And so what was going to be a very static plate shoot...
...turned into one of the more important things we shot in the film...
...which was to mount the camera to the ships...
...have them move through lighting conditions that would really be there.
So we would get the exact shadows, and so forth, on the surface of the ship.
The flying of the Rangers, or the Landers, you know, when they would turn into the sun.
We tried to be faithful towards what it actually should be in terms of intensity...
...and what kind of shadows it would cast, where the sun would come from.
We had literally tried to replicate the sun.
I've never shot a film where I used so hard light as in this one.
So things get very contrasty sometimes.
And they really showed a presence of that very singular light source.
MAN 1: Here we go. Starting the sequence.
- Rolling. - MAN 2: Rolling.
And action.
SMITH: The docking sequences were very much...
...trying to follow the NASA tradition of locked off cameras. Trying to show...
...more of the procedural aspect of being in space.
NOLAN: In the edit suite, it became quite an important pacing decision...
...because you say there are two types of science-fiction film, really.
There's the type of science-fiction film where docking, per se, is nothing.
It's something you immediately leap over.
So that you can go to far more extraordinary things.
You know, laser beams or whatever. You know, all this stuff going on.
- Let's do one more of those right away please. - MAN: We'll go again.
NOLAN: Can we do the...
...retro thrusters on this one ?
NOLAN: And then you have the kind of film, which Interstellar needed to be...
...to say, "No, this would be difficult."
I haven't had much opportunity to practice it for real. None in fact for most of the crew.
So they're very nervous. It's tricky. All kinds of things could go wrong.
SMITH: And of course, the first scene very much has to lay the groundwork...
...for the difficulty that Dr. Mann's character has at the other end of the film.
That he can't just zoom in, stop.
You know, he actually has to dock...
...it's a dangerous procedure, and if you get it wrong it can have issues, as it does.
MYERS: We ended up shooting all of this material with the full-size sets.
I don't know if anybody's done this before. It's sort of a new way of doing that.
Basically taking set pieces that are meant for exterior work...
...and shooting them as if they were a miniature.
NOLAN: A very unique experience to be able to do that.
And I think that the material in the film is very different for that.
I mean, it's a lot of effort to go to...
...but since we'd already built the ships for this other reason...
...it seemed the best thing would be to maximize our use of the stuff.
Cut. Beautiful.