OTERO: Chris has a real feel to his movies that belies the scale.
To do that, you have to go to the real places.
A science fiction picture like this, you have to go to places that really stamp...
...a kind of reality on the script.
In the story, Iceland is used as both what we call Miller's planets and Mann's planet.
And Mann's planet is all ice.
I participate in Miller's planet, which is a planet completely covered in water.
NOLAN: We went to Iceland because, having shot sections of Batman Begins...
...the stuff set in the Himalayas...
...we knew the terrain well.
We knew it offered us different looks that we hadn't been able to use in that film.
It's one of the few places in the world...
...where you can get two or three very, very different extreme looks...
...within the space of a couple of miles.
And so we went there initially looking for the ice planet.
And then we started looking for the water planet...
...because we noticed on the map something that we'd seen years before...
...which was these great deltas...
...where the water goes across the black volcanic material into the sea.
And what we were looking for in the water planet was...
...water that looked very deep but actually was quite shallow.
OTERO: You look at a place that looks, for all the world...
...like an endless horizon of water that has no tide...
...has a bottom you can stand on...
...and you just say, "This is absolutely, unimaginably perfect.
I didn't know there was a place like this in the world."
It helps everybody conceptualizing the picture to live the fiction.
It was a big undertaking to get the crew and equipment and everything out there.
We actually had to pave a road for 15 kilometers.
STILLMAN: They did an amazing job, actually.
They put pipes, they made it so we could get a lot of equipment in there.
We had to bring in a huge crane so we could pick up one of the spaceships...
...so it had to be a sturdy road.
The location was perfect, really...
...in that the sand underneath the water was very, very firm.
Allowed us to put our very heavy spaceship out in the middle of it.
FISHER: The Ranger weighed about 14,000 pounds.
We had a lot of mechanical parts, a lot of stuff had to function.
MYERS: We drove around in these sort of 15-passenger vans...
...but the wheels are about four feet in diameter.
They're up on high...
...and so they'd go through the water just like it was a puddle.
We'd just be driving around. Everything was on platforms or in those vans.
And they'd always be running around trying to move out of the frame...
...and we shot the whole sequence like that.
NOLAN: You know, the whole crew had to wear waders...
...and be working in knee-deep water the whole time, which poses challenges.
I think people found it extremely challenging.
Several days of that gets old pretty quickly, but everybody stuck with it.
And they could see the visual benefit that we were getting...
...from shooting in this real place.
THOMAS: I particularly felt bad for Anne and Wes who were out in this water...
...in this freezing cold water.
What Anne didn't tell us until the end of the first day...
...was that there was a hole in her suit.
HATHAWAY: The plan was for me to be airtight in my suit...
...but unfortunately, a zipper didn't get totally closed.
So when I went under the water, as per the script...
...my suit filled up with the cold water.
It was fine. That was my first day. Ha, ha.
BENTLEY: It was pretty cold.
It wasn't too cold outside, but standing in that water...
...and we were there all day, and you had to stand, you couldn't sit...
...and these suits that I hadn't negotiated before...
...that were very tricky.
The wave sequence for us was a very big collaboration.
It started with us in Iceland on the lake.
Doyle goes to get in the back of the spaceship, and he's ripped away from the back.
And we had a mobile stunt rig made that was on the back of an all-terrain vehicle...
...and the back of it was just a flat platform, so we built a truss rig on the back of there...
...so it would give us our point that we would pick him to...
...and all of the ram and everything was built into that.
So at any point we could drive out to the middle of the water, hook him up...
...and we had everything rehearsed and dialed in...
...so we could get it done and then drive it out because everything had to stay mobile.
Something about the location, though, didn't make it hard to imagine.
There's a massive wave that's about to get swept up.
And then they put me on a wire...
...and we just had to get the timing right for me diving in the ship...
...and then pulling me right off the ship as the wave got there.
Chris said, “This needs to be a big wave." It's 4000 feet high.
You know, that's the height of the tallest mountain in England.
If the wave was 4000 feet high, would it swirl the clouds out of the way?
Would the clouds get in front of it? How would it be lit?
It's a combination of very, very detailed rigorous simulation...
...of what water should actually do using physics simulations...
...to work out how do the waves splash and sweep the spacecraft away...
...and how does the water surge over the hull of the spacecraft.
And that was a quite tricky thing to do was to work out...
...what would be the surface details that would tell you this thing is 4000 feet high?
And of course, this all then had to be integrated seamlessly...
...into the photography that we'd done on the location.
It was a very, very awkward location to film on, I have to say.
It was amazing, though, because there was a moment where I was standing there...
...and I'm looking around and there's just nothing around me.
It was just the water and the sky, and it really felt like another planet.
It's one of those special experiences that you dream of as a kid...
...that you're alone on a planet with a ship, and you're in a spacesuit.
McCONAUGHEY: The circumstances...
...work on a glacier that seems endless, that's growing in front of your eyes...
...kind of humiliates you...
...in a "sitting in the palm of mother nature," in a very good way.
Imagination is fun, but when you can get the reality, it's a bonus.
It's probably too extreme to say one of the wonders of the world...
...but it's the biggest glacier in Europe. It's mammoth. It's enormous.
It's extraordinary to set eyes upon.
So you just can't re-create the elements like we had to deal with there.
Knowing that if we went back to the same glacier...
...where we'd shot Batman Begins...
...we'd find some of the best ice formations to portray the landscape we wanted...
...in a very practical setting.
Because the glacier there is one you can actually bring vehicles up onto.
You can sort of drive right onto it.
We worried about, you know, the volcano had blown a few years ago...
...and put a lot of ash there.
And did we want this sort of clean ice planet, this sort of very white and blue...
...or were we okay with this sort of black dust marbleization of the ice?
As you go into Iceland and looking at the ash on the ice...
...made us kind of figure...
...well, actually, yeah, maybe it should be a more gritty, dirty hostile--
This place is hostile.
Like, you're giving up Earth, the alternative isn't great.
The big undertaking was that...
...we built these full size sets onto the glacier itself.
It was pretty massive.
CROWLEY: We see Dr. Mann's pod that has essentially been there 20 years.
We had to build that in. Like, 20 years of being battered by ice storms.
We had to really age it into the glacier.
And so that meant digging into the glacier to put the pod in.
And then we needed to build the set in.
So you discover all these things, is that...
...anything that touches the glacier makes the glacier melt.
So you are continually separating your set from where it's supposed to be buried...
...so every day you have to rebuild it.
COTTLE: We couldn't just put a rig in and leave it.
Because, the locals will tell you, that the ice can change...
...you know, three to four inches overnight.
If they have heavy rain or heavy winds or whatever...
...so we'd put in a piece of truss and bolt it into the floor.
The next day you come back, and the bolts are just out.
FISHER: The spaceships had to be moved from the water to the glacier.
And we'd load it onto a flatbed. Luckily, we didn't have to disassemble it.
That's one of the good parts about being remote.
They let us, even though it was 20 feet wide, they let us load it onto a truck...
...and drive it to the next location because there was nothing in between there.
MYERS: We even went to the point of shuttling our crew via helicopter...
...from the bottom to the top in a reduced unit...
...to be able to shoot some of the cleaner, whiter-colored glacier.
There was a moment when I had to say:
"Okay, there's two helicopters landing on a glacier now.
"And there-- Okay, yep, there's a day at work."
NOLAN: We'd shot in the same location before and had a problem with winds.
You know, we'd had 60- to 70-mile-hour winds on Batman Begins, which had shut us down.
You know, you have a mountain guide on set.
In fact, we had a whole team of them because we were all on the glacier on this film.
So you listen to them in terms of...
...at what point they think the gusts might be too fast.
And in fact, on Interstellar we had winds over 100 miles an hour.
And these gusts can come very unexpectedly.
So we would work up on the glacier, get as many shots as we could...
...and when the safety guys felt like...
...the gusts were beginning to show too much strength...
...we would all hunker down and make our way back down in the vehicles.
Chris being Chris, he was obviously very upset at the idea...
...of all us sitting around back at the hotel.
And frankly, there's not a lot to do in Iceland when the wind is that bad.
And we just wanted to get on with shooting.
So he whisked us all out into the parking lot...
...where we shot some inserts as long as we could.
I've almost never been...
...at some unbelievably far, distant location, in some unbelievably exotic place...
...and you make a shot in the parking lot.
It's just a point of pride, you know? Ha, ha.
We had a lot of action on the ice.
Chris was adamant that we rehearse this fight.
He didn't want a big, kind of choreographed fight.
These are two scientists just trying to survive, basically, you know?
None of them have got any particular skills.
So it was really just a huge wrestling match.
In Los Angeles, on stage, we would work through everything.
We would practice the jumps.
We would practice the jumps back up, the fight on the ice, the slide down the ice.
We had all of that worked out, and we knew the mechanics it took...
...and the equipment we needed to make that work.
We just then had to take that whole thing and put it on the ice.
So when we were building it...
...we were testing everything again and again with weight bags...
...and see how it would react to being put under load.
So for us that was a real big concern...
...that we would make sure that all of those points were safe and secure.
Because, you know, we were sliding actors and stunt people...
...down 80-foot sheets of ice.
OTERO: You have two men fighting each other...
...but each one is also fighting the environment he's in.
By the way, while we were doing it, there'd occasionally be a loud noise.
And we'd look up, and there was an avalanche a few hundred meters away.
You know, it gave us all pause, and we asked our local guides...
...expert glacier climbers, we said, "Do we need to worry about that?”
"No, no. Don't worry. Not a problem."
And that happened several more times.
And we, of course, got jaded after a couple of hours of this.
"Sure, it's another avalanche. That happens."
And we went back to fighting, you know? Ha, ha.
I very much enjoy the satisfaction of getting something in camera.
The planning comes into play because there was so much stuff filmed around the pod.
We had to film in it with a functioning door, everything working.
Then they went away for a few hours...
...and they'd wanna come back and then blow the pod up.
You gotta know when you're gonna do it, and make sure it's ready when you get to it.
That was definitely a one-taker, for sure, because there was only one pod. Heh.
CROWLEY: I find it very exciting, energizing...
...trying to achieve the set build in difficult locations.
And we knew that we could achieve what we wanted to do in Iceland.
We'd been there before, and we felt comfortable with it.
THOMAS: It was extremely arduous physically, shooting in these outdoor locations.
But the great thing is, I think it paid off.
And soon as we got back to L.A., we were able to watch our dailies...
...and feel like it truly was worth it.