Jim Bissell

The Sci-Fi film genre has depicted some of the most incredible spacecrafts and apocalyptic worlds ever seen in movies. After countless depictions of these space-related worlds throughout the years, it is especially impressive when a film can present a spacecraft and the reality of Earth in such a distinct, unique way. The immensely talented Jim Bissell was able to do just that with the new film, The Midnight Sky.

In an exclusive interview with Interiors, we spoke with Jim Bissell, who is the Production Designer for The Midnight Sky. The photos, concept art and drawings are courtesy of Jim Bissell and Netflix.

INT: First off, we were curious how the opportunity to do the film, The Midnight Sky, came about? What was it about it that made you want to work on it?

JB: I will collaborate with George Clooney whenever I’m invited, and, as luck would have it, the project came along just as a show I was working on fell apart. George always picks unique material, and The Midnight Sky’s meditation on death, regret and redemption as experienced through his character Augustine, seemed to resonate on all levels of the human experience.

INT: One of the locations featured in the film is the Aether spaceship, which is one of the most unique spacecrafts ever depicted. What was the process like designing this ship and how developed was it when it was first described to you? Did it evolve and change over time?

JB: George wanted the spacecraft to look unlike anything seen before in films. Challenges facing designers who are trying to address the really knotty problems of accommodating human life on long duration space flights were of particular interest to me. The old trope of having a flight deck at the front of the spacecraft was the first thing we did away with. This configuration has its origins in the familiar visual language of a terrestrial aircraft but really has no application to space travel. It’s not like you have to guide a spacecraft onto final approach on a runway, or steer around planets and asteroids that get in your way. More important for the health and well being of the astronauts is that they spend as much time as possible in artificial gravity protected from radiation. To address those issues, we started with a 2011 NASA prototype called Nautilus. That design employs a torus constructed to spin around a central axis creating centrifugal force, the only alternative to gravity (according to Einstein and others). We ditched the torus and went with a baton design instead, using light weight expandable habitats at either end secured by an endoskeleton supporting the floors they walked on and individual sleeping/living pods. A similarly designed exoskeleton helped keep the habitats in place and the external machinery processing waste and atmosphere from flying off into space. For the end and exoskeletons, we tried to mimic the very organic look of structures designed using topological optimization. Additionally, the mass of the astronauts moving about the habitats affected navigation, so sensors on the floors and in the access shafts tracked their movements allowing the powerful onboard computer guiding the ship’s navigational systems to compensate accordingly. The interior design is spare, but uses LED lighting to help the crew maintain their circadian rhythm’s and provides a neutral, comforting environment that won’t drive them crazy after years of confinement on a long journey.

INT: The contrast between the Aether spaceship, which feels like a living organism, and the stale, uninhabitable reality of earth is incredibly distinct. From a Production Design standpoint, how did you and your team try to develop these two separate realities?

JB: The Spaceship embodies humanity’s plight; a spinning bag of gas floating through space supporting vulnerable life forms. The research station is Augustine’s brain: filled with data gathering equipment in a basic life sustaining environment. The outside is cold and forbidding. The journey is the discovery that through the cold, forbidding arctic environment and into the harsh and deadly distances of space, Augustine discovers his humanity, and hope for himself and his species. In this day and age, is there a more important issue to explore?

INT: You’ve worked on cinematic classics like ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jumanji, 300 and many more. What are some of the most valuable things you have learned about Production Design throughout your illustrious career?

JB: Movies can be described as a series of images that together tell a story. Each image has two principle components: performance and context. I have learned that the most effective images don’t necessarily make pretty pictures; they create cinematic experiences. Uniting performance and context creates both a visceral and intellectual understanding of a character’s situation in the narrative. If that united imagery is effective existentially and metaphorically-success! The audience understands on an experiential level the situation of the protagonists.

Achieving that is a combination of aesthetics, technique and the rigorous pursuit of details that help a story transcend into a cinematic experience.

Jim Bissell is a Production Designer and has worked on various Films.