He didn’t have to sculpt a life-size spaceship with functional hydraulic gears. He didn’t have to transport that spaceship to Iceland in a 747 cargo hold. But one day, during the filming of Interstellar, production designer Nathan Crowley found himself standing in water as far as he could see—a glacial wash only 2 feet deep. Just off camera, a giant crane was placing the 52-foot-long spaceship, its landing gear extended, into the water. “The back door opens,” Crowley says, “and the actors get out. We’re in water, in this odd landscape, the sky is heavy, and there it is—this strange world with a spaceship in it.”

Crowley is one of Hollywood’s most daring and sought-after production designers. Those in his profession are responsible for the overall look and feel of a film—helping producers and directors scout locations, designing sets and props, and determining what will be handled with effects in postproduction. Crowley is unique among his peers in that where others render, he prefers to build. His résumé includes both giant summer popcorn flicks and plucky independents; works grounded in careful historicity (the gangster biopic Public Enemies) and those that soar in fantasy and science fiction (John Carter and HBO’s upcoming Westworld reboot). But his most celebrated work—the source of both his Oscar nominations—has been with Christopher Nolan, the director whose aesthetic most closely matches Crowley’s. Together they devised the feverish icescapes of Insomnia, the steampunk London of The Prestige, and the dark and sprawling Gotham of The Dark Knight trilogy. Crowley’s hallmark, building physical environments and set pieces rather than simulating them in post, is especially evident in Interstellar.

Crowley is unique among his peers in that where others render, he prefers to build.

With his wispy hair and irregular goatee, Crowley looks like a cross between a Left Bank bohemian and a house painter: half artist, half handyman. “You don’t make the film in the art department,” he says. “You make it outside. You make it with a camera.” He learned that lesson early on, in a career that began by accident almost 25 years ago. Having grown up in North London, Crowley went to Brighton Polytechnic to study 3-D design—“a loose term for ‘I don’t know what I want to do,’” he says—and then decamped to Los Angeles in search of an architecture job. One night in a bar on Melrose, opposite Paramount Studios, he bumped into a guy he knew from art school. The former classmate was working on a Steven Spielberg film called Hook. He said they needed someone who could draw. So Crowley found himself working as a junior set designer on one of the most outlandish, overdone productions in the history of cinema. British designer Norman Garwood had been given free rein and a blank check: His soundstage Neverland, populated with live storks and flamingoes, reportedly cost $8 million on its own. “Hook was just confusing,” Crowley says. “Garwood was building ships the size of the HMS Victory and flooding stages.”

Hook taught Crowley the outer limits of going big. His next job showed him an entirely different way of making movies. Garwood pulled some strings to get him on the Sony lot, where Francis Ford Coppola was making Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Crowley ended up on Coppola’s second unit, working mainly for the director’s son Roman. Their mandate was to spruce up the film with practical effects and vintage stagecraft trickery. That meant puppets and miniatures, double exposures, and a 19th-century theater ploy called Pepper’s Ghost, among other gambits found in dusty manuals of magic. “Hook taught me how to build enormous sets if needed,” he says. “Dracula taught me the wonders of the camera.”

Those two productions would form the axes of the Crowley method: one grand and the other gritty, one expansive and the other handmade (and neither done with a computer). He has bridged the two with his devotion to found environments and a desire to extend reality rather than replace it. “He’s not excited by the size of sets,” Nolan says. “He’s much more excited by the size of things in the real world.”

Which is why, on their trip to Iceland for Interstellar, the duo strapped on crampons and hiked up Eyjafjallajökull, a 5,000-foot-tall volcano that last erupted in 2010. The glacier is strikingly marbled with black ash, but Crowley and Nolan weren’t sure how well it would fit with the film. “We had a big debate,” Crowley says. “We’d go back and forth, stay the night, then hike back out there the next day.” Eventually they decided to use it for the movie’s frozen planet. And when local farmers directed them to that vast, shallow delta, they knew it was the perfect spot to land the spaceship on the other planet, the one covered by water. “When you see the thing that’s right, you jump on it,” Nolan says. “We’ve worked together long enough to know that immediately.”

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But even with their similar aesthetics and comfortable collaboration style, Nolan can challenge Crowley’s methods. The hardest thing about Interstellar for Crowley was imagining time and space inside a black hole. “It was the first thing we talked about,” Crowley says, “and the last thing we managed to design.” Their goal was to create a room where time could visually unfold as a sort of contrail for each object, as if stretching it in multiple dimensions. Faced with such a mind-bending design challenge—he had to build the inside of a black hole—most directors and designers would have given in and turned to CGI. But Crowley and Nolan wanted real substance: a set that actors could touch and interact with, something that existed outside of the photographic image. Crowley tried to make a room with walls of one-way mirrors so its furniture would appear reflected into infinity—but that didn’t capture what he and Nolan wanted. They couldn’t find a solution, until one day in Iceland when production was suspended by a heavy storm and they found themselves trapped for hours in the hotel restaurant with visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin. There the three devised what Crowley now calls “an impregnable mesh of installation art”: a three-story framed structure, 90 feet by 60 feet by 45 feet, that contained multiple versions of the same room, with interior furnishings hand-sculpted to surreal dimensions so they would stretch across from one space into another.

“People have forgotten the other ways to do visual effects,” Crowley says. It may be efficient and effective to decorate a scene with digital shapes or stretch its borders with CGI. But if you build from real materials and extend from a genuine landscape, the image has a sense of weight that would otherwise be missing. It also leaves you open to the unexpected.

“Very few production designers are able to deliver scope and scale in such an unpretentious way,” says Wally Pfister, Nolan’s former director of photography. “He’s an artist who happened to fall into art direction,” says Andrew Bolton, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, where Crowley has designed several fashion exhibitions over the years.

“The advantage of not faking is that you feel it,” Crowley says. You feel that realness in the eerie light bulbs of The Prestige, in the kludgy beauty of the Batmobile, in the tempered grandiosity of Bruce Wayne’s bunker, and in the surreal and stretched-out spacetime of Interstellar. Nathan Crowley doesn’t have to build his worlds by hand, but he knows it makes them better.

Daniel Engber (@danengber) wrote about the inventor of body plastination in issue 21.02.



