Nathan Crowley 2.0
My confidence stems from a career grounded in real-world production. It’s about applying a mix of things we do practically, like being a farmer and growing nine million tulips. We successfully cultivated five-hundred acres of corn for Interstellar, so I’m certain we can achieve the nine million tulips required for the Munchkin landscapes. I’ve already gone through my nervous period of wondering if that was insane! I know it will work. So now, my optimism is based on some confidence. Similarly, I’m convinced we can construct a one-hundred-six foot, fully operational Wizard’s train, traversing a field of barley we’ve cultivated specifically for the scene.
It’s very hard to explain that to tables of crew and producers, who are used to twenty-five years of doing all that in CGI. To say, But what happens if we get something unexpected in these grey skies, that makes the photography better than we could ever imagine? What if it gives us something we couldn’t have ever thought to fake? We all know how there’s a nostalgia to a real grey sky with the sun coming through it, and the wind. This combined with the joy of the actors reacting to an actual train coming into a station and then believing it’s going to take them to the Emerald City.
AS: You had a full-size, moving train that the actors got into?
NC: Yes, it was motorized. We grew the barley around it to evoke that quintessential American image. The Wizard of Oz is an American fairytale so you’ve got to put Americana in it. You’re going from Kansas across the Great Plains. Our train station was a deliberate echo of the one in Once Upon a time in the West, but the Oz-ian version. A solitary, wooden platform amidst the vast expanse of winter wheat, a liminal space between the familiar world of Kansas and the magical realm of Oz. Any post-production attempts to clutter this stark simplicity with extraneous elements like added lampposts were actively discouraged!
The train’s design stemmed directly from the Wizard’s persona. He’s an illusionist, a creator of automatons, a watchmaker. Therefore, the train couldn’t be a conventional steam engine. It’s a vehicle born of illusion and clockwork, not fire and coal. Everything is levers and wheels and pulleys. It had to be a clockwork marvel, a testament to his technological ingenuity.
AS: Also in our last conversation, you described working on The Dark Knight where you’d go to Home Depot and source random elements that could be assembled into prototype models for Batman’s vehicles. How is your process different now?
NC: My exploration of 3D printing followed that period. Our design process often begins with visual references and sketches, which are then translated into 3D models by model makers before printing. During this time, I became proficient in Modo. The joy of 3D printing and modeling is if you have enough printers you can print it in parts overnight and then look at it in the morning and then, if necessary, discard it. Nothing’s precious. You modify it until you find the design. It’s the same process as the Home Depot kit-bashing. Kit-bashing was the fastest way that you could look at a shape every morning and say, Okay that doesn’t work, throw that away. I have to say looking for visual parts at Toys R Us or Home Depot sort of trains your eye to put things together. So every experience contributes to your creative journey. What I appreciate most about art departments is their adaptability. You need what you need for each film or each type of film. And it can be just a pencil. Or it can be more sophisticated. Now we have the Unreal Engine and we can fly around the sets we design.