Mis-en-scene

Production designer for Interstellar: Nathan Crowley

Nathan Crowley started out as an art director and worked on movies such as Braveheart, Mission Impossible 2, and The Devil's Own. As a production designer, Crowley has worked on films such as Behind Enemy Lines, Insomnia, Veronica Guerin, Batman Begins, The Lake House, The Dark Knight and Public Enemies.

According to an article from IndieWire, "designing wormholes, black-holes and other space-time-bending phenomena was a first" for Crowley in Interstellar. This scene with Matthew McConaughey falling into the tesseract was done with a physical set instead of using CGI.

Crowley faced difficulties like designing these sets that had to do with jumping through space-time and designing far away planets. This set design with the tesseract scene seems to be more simplistic but also complex when watching the sequence. When looking at these two photos, I see the law of continuity play out with all of the lines in the set, which also goes along great with the theme of space throughout the film. I also see all of the other Gestalt principles as well, especially law of closure as all of these lines or blocks are close together and make up the tesseract itself.

Even though designing this set was a first for Crowley, I'm sure he got some inspiration from past set designs he has worked on. This one just seems more innovative.