'Interstellar' - Building a Black Hole

Designing wormholes, black-holes and other space-time-bending phenomena was a first for production designer Nathan Crowley, who approached Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" like a kid in a candy store.

"As a director and designer, we realized that we had to be quite brave here. Something new," says Crowley, who has twice been Oscar-nominated for Nolan films "The Prestige" (2006) and "The Dark Knight" (2008). This year, there's no question that he is the frontrunner. The architecture devotee suffuses Nolan's ultra-imaginative space odyssey with innovative spacecraft, planets, robots and the cosmos.

Here are four challenges Crowley had to face while making "Interstellar," in which the filmmakers sought to achieve the most realistic vision of the cosmos ever put to the screen.

Jumping through Space-Time

Along with plunging into wormholes, another first for Crowley was working so closely up front with VFX (supervised by "Inception" Oscar winner Paul Franklin). And thanks to legendary Caltech physicist and exec producer Kip Thorne, it was a lot easier to visualize the film's mind-blowing tunnel and sphere effects when given precise mathematical calculations about gravity and time-space theory.

"For me, it was about understanding the navigation," Crowley suggests. The real breakthrough came when Franklin came up with the notion of the black hole as "a vertical waterfall of light." But the real fun, as always, was sitting and sketching with Nolan in his home, coming up unique designs that are both modern and retro.

Finding Far Away Planets

"To me, the story's about nothing's as good as the Earth," says Crowley about the "Oz"-like inspiration. That's why Matthew McConaughey's farmhouse (constructed in Alberta, Canada, or "Days of Heaven" country) had to be warm and cozy, despite the blight that's ravaged Mother Earth.

By contrast, if "there is no place like home," then the far off ice and water planets had to be anything but beautiful and familiar. Both were shot in Iceland. A trip to Mackem Bay in the north of England inspired the otherworldly look of marble ice sheets. And the water planet is comprised of 4,000-foot tidal waves, the likes of which we've never witnessed before.

Conjuring Next-Gen Space Ships

When it came to conjuring the film's trio of next-gen NASA spacecraft with Nolan, "The Ranger had to be the sleek sports car and the Lander was the workhorse (Canadian or Russian heavy-lift choppers). The Endurance was designed as a 12-pod circular station with a central docking system that spun around in space because of gravity."

Building TARS the Robot

An even bigger challenge was the primary 'bot, TARS, puppeteered and voiced by Bill Irwin. Partially inspired by the iconic monolith from "2001," and with a more snarky personality than supercomputer HAL 9000's, TARS started out simply as a block of metal. Why not start all over from the beginning?

"[Nolan] thought about the scissor effect. In between that, I was a fan of minimalism and [the late architect] Mies van der Rohe. We started with a monolith and divided it into four. Then we came up with mathematical divisions of four for something more sophisticated with the block breaking down into three pins and four legs. It was continuously matching divisions of itself."

Video: The science of building a Black Hole:

Creature Design

Some great tips on designing and painting creatures of all kinds, courtesy of Mike Corriero.

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Visit Mike Corriero's website here.

‘American Sniper’ →

Hollywood uses ‘American Sniper’ to destroy history & create myth

The moral depravity into which the US is sinking is shown by the movie American Sniper glorifying the exploits of a racist killer receiving six Oscar nominations, whereas ‘Selma’ depicting Martin Luther King’s struggle against racism has received none.

American Sniper is directed by Clint Eastwood, and tells the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty in Iraq as a sniper credited with 160 confirmed “kills”, and earning him the dubious honor of being lauded the most lethal sniper in US military history.
Played by Bradley Cooper, in the movie Kyle is an all-American hero, a Texas cowboy who joins the military out of a sense of patriotism and a yearning for purpose and direction in his life. Throughout the ‘uber-tough’ selection process, Kyle is a bastion of stoicism and determination, willing to bear any amount of pain and hardship for the honor of being able to serve his country as a Navy Seal – America’s equivalent of the Samurai.
The personal struggle he endures as a result of what he experiences and does in Iraq is not motivated by any regrets over the people he kills, including women and children, but on his failure to kill more and thereby save the lives of American soldiers as they go about the business of tearing the country apart, city by city, block by block, and house by house.
If American Sniper wins one Oscar, never mind the six it’s been nominated for, when this annual extravaganza of movie pomp and ceremony unfolds in Hollywood on February 22, it will not only represent an endorsement of US exceptionalism, but worse it will be an insult to the Iraqi people. In the movie they are depicted as a dehumanized mass of savages – occupying the same role as the Indians in John Wayne Western movies of old – responsible for their own suffering and the devastation of their country, which the white man is in the process of civilizing.
Anything resembling balance and perspective is sacrificed in American Sniper to the more pressing needs of US propaganda, which holds that the guys who served in Iraq were the very best of America, men who went through hell in order to protect the freedoms and way of life of their fellow countrymen at home. It is the cult of the soldier writ large, men who in the words of Kyle (Bradley Cooper) in the movie “just want to get the bad guys.”
The ”bad guys” are, as mentioned, the Iraqis. In fact if you had just arrived in the movie theatre from another planet, you would be left in no doubt from the movie’s opening scene that Iraq had invaded and occupied America rather than the other way round.
Unsurprisingly, the real Chris Kyle was not as depicted by Clint Eastwood and played by Bradley Cooper. In his autobiography, upon which the movie is supposedly based, Kyle writes, “I hate the damn savages. I couldn’t give a flying f**k about the Iraqis.”
It is clear that the movie’s director, Clint Eastwood, when faced with the choice between depicting the truth and the myth, decided to go with the myth.
But it should come as no surprise, given that the peddling of such myths is the very currency of Hollywood. Over many decades the US movie industry has proved itself one of the most potent weapons in the armory of US imperialism, helping to project a myth of an America, defined by lofty attributes of courage, freedom, and democracy.
As the myth has it, these values, and with them America itself, are continually under threat from the forces of evil and darkness that lurk outwith and often times within. The mountain of lies told in service to this myth has only been exceeded by the mountain of dead bodies on the basis of it – victims of the carnage and mayhem unleashed around the world by Washington.
Chris Kyle was not the warrior or hero portrayed in American Sniper. He was in fact a racist killer for whom the only good Iraqi was a dead Iraqi. He killed men, women, and children, just as his comrades did during the course of a brutal and barbaric war of aggression waged by the richest country in the world against one of the poorest.
They say that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In the hands of a movie director with millions of dollars and the backing of a movie studio at its disposal, it is far more dangerous than that. It is a potent weapon deployed against its victims, denying them their right to even be considered victims, exalting in the process, when it comes to Hollywood, those who murder and massacre in the name of America.
With this in mind, it is perhaps fitting that Chris Kyle was shot and killed by a former Marine at a shooting range in Texas in 2013. “Man was born into barbarism,” Martin Luther King said, “when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence.”