Mis-en-Scene - Interstellar and Designing the Tesseract

One of the most visually stunning moments of Interstellar was also the most complicated to design and produce. It took intense collaboration throughout the entire course of filming between the director, special effects and the design departments. "The best way I can describe it is I felt like we built this art installation on set and people would come in and you know, it would be very confusing to them about what on earth is going on here," said production designer Nathan Crowley.

Turning the impossible into reality is the sole guiding purpose behind Crowley's designs, a demand often tested by director Christopher Nolan. He is know as being part handyman and part artist and is responsible for the overall look of the film. His passion for building real and functional set pieces rather than relying on simulation in post production has earned him two Oscar nominations for his previous work with Nolan on "The Prestige," and "The Dark Knight." However, it was his nominated work for Interstellar that pushed the limits of his talents.

The "Tesseract" scene was meant to be a physical representation of time as a fifth dimension that could be interacted with by his lead character, played by Mathew McConaughey. It was something that has never been attempted in film and frankly has only existed in the minds of geniuses like Einstein, but Crowley was expected to bring it to reality. It took several months of planning and model making just to figure out the designs before the practical set building could begin. Nolan demanded that every set be built upon a set of rules and mathematics that had to be be invented on the spot and applied to the scene.

The simplest way to understand the room is to think of  a great system of cubes that are interconnected on all sides. The walls of each cube are composed of a series of lines that are meant to represent the waves of gravity that can span across time. All the objects in the room and the room itself would leave traces or extrusions that connect everything together inside this large array or system of rooms. It seems complicated because it is. Crowley had to figure out how everything had to be stretched in the X,Y, and Z axis before they could even began construction. The final set was built within a 100 x 90 x 45 ft. room. It began with recording the shapes of the items and recreating the shapes digitally in the visual effects department and stretching each of them. The designs then had to be printed out and wrapped around the enormous physical sets. Once that was completed, projectors were used to accent the walls and cause motion with light. It was imperative that everything in the Tesseract felt tactile and real.

I think this is a good representation of the Law of Continuity. As McConaughey is pulled through this "fifth dimension," the lines draw your eye to the center ahead of him and force you to the direction they chose. They create an index vector that is the foundation of everything you feel in the scene. I have to admit I was fooled the first time I watched into thinking it was entirely CGI. I thought it was so unbelievable that it had to be created artificially and that is where Crowley's job becomes so important. He comes up with new an innovative ways to make the audience suspend disbelief.