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www.postmagazine.com 18 POST NOVEMBER 2014 ven before its nationwide opening on November 7th, there was lots of buzz surrounding director Christopher Nolan's new sci-fi epic, Interstellar, star- ring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Ha- thaway and Jessica Chastain. On board the Endurance starship, a group of space explorers travel to a distant solar system in search of new planet that can sustain human life, thus saving humanity. This is in response to our dying planet, Earth, plagued by drought, famine and radical climate change. Paramount Pictures' Interstellar, headed by an award-winning cast, takes on wormholes, black holes, space/time, love, family and human extinction, and is seemingly a serious contender for some of Oscar's top prizes. The fi lm, shot on-location in Canada, Iceland, and LA for the stage work, was captured in 35mm and 65mm IMAX by DP Hoyte van Hoytema. Prior to its opening, Post caught up with Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Paul Franklin (Inception) of London-based Double Negative, the sole vendor for the fi lm's visual eff ects. Having created 700- plus shots, Franklin discusses, here, the fi lm's numerous planetary environments. How involved were you with the fi lm, aside from your role in visual eff ects? "I was with the fi lm during production and post. I came over to LA early last year and worked in the pre-production offi ce for the three or four months we were in prep and then I was with the movie all the way through the shoot. "Chris likes to have all his creative leads with him the whole time. So, I was on-set to ensure things had been shot correctly, that we're getting the right information, and for the ongoing creative discussions, which starts when we're in pre-produc- tion, with the fi rst reading of the script and trying to work out how we were going to tell the story. Once in post, I presented the work every day to Chris to show him where we were with the work." What was your understanding of what Christopher Nolan wanted from you? "Chris called me up and said, 'I've got this new script and there's some really interesting visual eff ects challenges in it.' So I fl ew to LA and read the script in his offi ce. We went straight into a discussion about how we might visualize the partic- ularly-abstract parts of this fi lm. "Without giving anything away, the whole third act of the fi lm goes into a very interesting place. We're dealing with big cosmological themes, time, space, distance, big astronomical objects like black holes, stars, wormholes and the vast distances in the universe — and it's about working out an eff ective way to tell that story without it just becoming a big science documentary or becoming so abstract that the audience doesn't know what they're looking at. "We started thinking about ways other fi lmmakers or artists have approached the grand cosmological themes and, of course, as a fi lmmaker, you always come back to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey because it's the big thing that hangs over all of us attempting to deal with this kind of subject matter. It was a very incredibly-interesting process. But at a certain point, you have to start think- ing about how you are actually going to start realizing these things, so we start talking about technique and that's how we arrived at things like miniatures, for example. [All miniatures and models — predominantly the spacecrafts — were created by LA's New Deal studios.] "We wanted to give the fi lm a degree of 'tactile reality,' a term Chris used to describe it. He wanted it to look as if you can really reach out and touch these things; that they're not these beautiful- ly-pristine, computer-generated images; that there's something a bit more gritty; a bit more real about what we're looking at. We felt it was a shame to just assume that the default position would be that we would do all these things digitally." Can you discuss some of the VFX? "One of the things that was striking about this fi lm for us was how diverse the eff ects work was in the movie. As soon as we leave the Earth and travel into space, we have space rockets, giant space ships traveling cross the solar sys- tem, we're encountering the outer plan- ets, fl ying through the wormhole, and then we arrive in the new galaxy, which is supposed to be on the far side of the universe. And, we're encountering exotic alien environments there. And then, of course, we fi nally meet the black hole. "A big part of what we did for Inter- stellar is what I call the terrestrial work — the surface of the planets — whether it's our own Earth or the other planets they visit in the fi lm. For Earth, we created the dust storms for the opening of the fi lm where the idea is, the Earth is in some sort of unspecifi c ecological collapse, and there are dust storms, and we see this towering colossal dust storm sweep- BY LINDA ROMANELLO E DOUBLE NEGATIVE VOYAGES DEEP INTO SPACE WITH DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN ON HIS MOST AMBITIOUS EFFORT TO DATE INTERSTELLAR VISUAL EFFECTS The ice planet was actually shot on IMAX on a glacier in Iceland. VFX supervisor Paul Franklin (inset below) says some of the landscape was later replaced with digital matte paintings.