Interstellar’s tesseract

After a close encounter with a black hole, Matthew McConaughey’s astronaut Cooper enters a new dimension. As he navigates a physical realisation of multiple points in his daughter Murph’s timeline, the mind-melds of hard science, speculative sci-fi and emotion merge to epiphanic effect. While our eyes boggle, Cooper’s are opened wide to the realisation of where his voyage has been heading.

In theory, the tesseract sequence might seem too abstract to get a fix on. In practice, writer-director Christopher Nolan approached its confluence of gravitational conundrums and ghosts of the future as a leap of faith, designed to land with the force of grand revelation. Though the ideas at work are slippery, Nolan believed “the audience would feel a logic behind it” if the realisation was all it needed to be.

Production designer Nathan Crowley duly experimented with models, extrusions, stretched objects and prisms in order to express Nolan’s

ideas. Paul Franklin and VFX team Double Negative researched how to present time as a spatial dimension and referenced slit-scan photography – a “process that records one specific location across a whole range of moments”, says Franklin, who explored the idea of people leaving “world lines” behind them wherever and whenever they go in space and time.

The shapes of the objects in Murph’s room were reproduced digitally, so that the digi-versions could be used in sync with – this being Nolan - a colossal physical set.

DoP Hoyte Van Hoytema used the light through Murphy’s window as a lighting guide. Some 15 to 18 projectors cast animated images on to surfaces and helped light the scene. Meanwhile, stunt coordinator George Cottle – who described working on the meticulously mounted sequence as “the three longest weeks of my stunt career” – worked closely with McConaughey, who spent hours hanging in a harness.

The set’s physicality helped McConaughey locate the emotions at stake as Cooper realises he’s Murph’s ghost. His grand awakening gains in impact from the intimate yet expansive exhalations of Hans Zimmer’s organ-based score, music inspired by Nolan’s précis of the film (working title ‘Flora’s Letter’, after Nolan’s daughter) as a parent/child separation tale.

For the director, Interstellar’s take on time’s march is achingly personal, hinged on time spent apart from family: “The sense of your life passing you by and your kids growing up before your eyes.” Even if we’re all at the mercy of time, the heightened heart rush of Cooper’s journey home will surely stand its test. KH