Mis-en-Scene

The role I chose to evaluate in the movie Interstellar was that of the Art Director.  The movie is artistic and very beautiful and I have to applaud the Art Department for what their creativity and imagination.  The Art Directors for this movie were Kendelle Elliott, David F. Klassen, Josh Lusby, Eric Sundahl, and Dean Wolcott.  Kendelle Elliott also did the art direction for the movie The Cabin in the Woods.  David Klassen worked on Django Unchained, as well as both Iron Man and Iron Man 2.  Josh Lusby worked on American Sniper.  Eric Sundahl is known for his art direction for 2 of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, "Dead Man's Chest" and "At World's End".  Dean Wolcott did such movies as X-Men 2, Ant-Man, and Divergent.  All of these Art Directors have excellent resumes and worked together to make Interstellar one of the best Sci-Fi movies of it's time.

The Art Directors work with the Production Designers to make sure that the vision of the Production Designer is being translated into the film.   The work with the sets and locations which is crucial to the uniqueness of the film.  Once the script is made for a film, the Art Director goes through and organizes each scene and what props or other scene requirements.  Art Directors have to handle the Art Departments budget, and manage the schedule of when things need to be done.

The scene our group chose to analyze from Interstellar was the "Tesseract Scene" which is one of the last scenes of the movie when Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) falls through the black hole and ends up in a tesseract where he is in an alternate dimension and is able to communicate with his young daughter through her bookshelf.  To my surprise, very little CGI, if not none at all was used in the scene, and that Nolan and his crew, including the art director/art department, built it.

Christopher Nolan and the Art Department worked together with one of the top astrophysicists, Kip Thorne, to make this movie, and this scene in particular, scientifically accurate.  The black hole at the beginning of this scene was a 3-dimensional sphere, which Thorne says is more accurate than the breach in space all other films used.

During the tesseract scene there are a few gestalt principles that are noticed.  The first is the Law of Continuity.  While McConaughey is falling through the black hole and into the tesseract there are many lines coming from the light through all the bookshelves that keep repeating themselves in other dimensions.  The Law of Continuity states that our eyes follow lines in the path of least resistance.  The other gestalt principle is the Law of Similarity. Even though this scene can be very confusing and hard to follow exactly what's going on, we are able to figure out that what we are seeing is the daughter's room repeated thousands of times because we group together the similarity of the bedrooms and bookshelves that all look exactly the same.We group them together to understand the different bedrooms in the different dimensions.  Figure/Ground relationships also exist in this scene because in order to portray the McConaughey is falling we see the light from the starts and the tesseract coming from the background into the foreground.  One good example from this in the scene is when McConaughey sees his daughter walking across her bedroom floor and beneath her is the same scene happening below and keeps repeating itself.

The Art Directors executed this scene really well and can be applauded for the minimal use of CGI.  The set, which was built, made this scene and film truly unique and beautiful to watch.  The Art Department was able to execute scenes that the human eye has never scene, like the spherical black hole, and make sense of concepts such as time relativity and alternate dimensions that can be difficult to understand.