It’s only a week old and already Interstellar has divided movie fans. Is it another stroke of genius from Christopher Nolan or is it just a confusing mess trying to be cleverer than it actually is? I’ll leave you to decide what you think it is. Either way it certainly has provided a plethora of talking points and one character that everyone seems to like is TARS.

TARS is a practical robot companion built and employed by NASA who travels with Matthew McConaughey and company on their journey through space. Voiced by veteran stage and television actor Bill Irwin, TARS managed to bring a little bit of much needed humour to the sombre, dramatic plot and falls somewhere between “a former Marine commander and a high-school gym teacher”. Irwin recently spoke to Vulture about the difficult job of bringing TARS to life.

Not only did Bill Irwin voice TARS but he was also in charge of puppeteering:

“…the word puppeteering never came up in that first conversation with Chris Nolan. It didn’t come up for awhile…It was very visceral, muscular puppeteering because it stood five feet high and was jointed in varying ways and could be reset. You operated it from behind, pushing it, meaning you were attached at the chest and each ankle, so you could push various parts of it, and your hands are on the controls in the back of the machine. Or, if they wanted to look at the machine straight on and have it walk away from camera, you were behind it, backing up.”

Irwin also spoke about filming the ocean scenes:

“We’d be standing in ice-cold water up to our thighs in Iceland, with metal that hadn’t been tried out…There was the weight plus the water displacement…It couldn’t go as fast as we wanted it to go. At one point, I was marking the scene and having fun doing the dialogue — this was actually CASE’s voice, not TARS, it wasn’t my voice heard, but for operating the machine and working with Chris, I’d lay down a guide track. So I’m acting with Wes Bentley and Anne Hathaway, and it’s their first moments on this new planet. They’re striding through the water, and I’m striding, too, but Chris wisely says, “Do you think you can make it go that fast, Bill?” No, I’m running through water, I couldn’t go that fast! We gave him what we could give him on camera and he artfully used that. Then Paul Franklin gave TARS the abilities beyond what we could do as puppeteer.”

On trying to develop the character and finding TARS’ personality:

“Chris said — and I think he’s prophetic with this — “Robots won’t look humanoid nor anthropomorphized.” That’s what movies have done up until now, but it doesn’t make much sense, engineering-wise. But quite conceivably, they’ll pattern artificial intelligence after human beings. One of my favorite lines is Wes Bentley explaining it to Matthew McConaughey: “They program him to have a personality. They think it makes a unit more cohesive.”

“It all started with what was on the page. The script is brilliant. Befuddling, at times, but brilliant. There was personality in this machine. And a point of view. His first job was to apply electric shock and subdue and arrest Cooper. Then he comes to serve Cooper. The persona jumped right off the page, somewhere between a former Marine commander and a high-school gym teacher. We would shoot scenes and lean into it more. Chris took a specific contour of when he wanted to hear a little more of the John Wayne angle, or less. It was programmed to have personality, but it didn’t get overbearing.”

What was your thoughts on TARS?

Check out our reviews of Interstellar here and here and be sure to listen to the podcast discussion too.

Gavin Logan – Follow me on Twitter