The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

Sometimes the built environment in film extends outside our atmosphere, allowing man to survive whilst in orbit around Earth, on a journey toward another body in the Solar System or voyaging beyond the infinite. Self-contained, highly specialised and with limited real-world precedents to draw on, generating a convincing habitat of this type is a challenge. The best examples, though, are successful dramatically as well as technically.

For destinations closest to home, filmmakers have been influenced by actual hardware and considered speculation in parallel. The sun is the centre of life but became the heart of darkness for the crew of Icarus II in psychological horror Sunshine. Embarking on a mission to restart our star with a nuclear device, their ship with its realistically functional interiors is protected by a vast, circular sunshield comprising thousands of mirrored facets. Its design thus reflects their objective, literally and metaphorically, setting up the theme of personalised fate for each. Astrophysicists and NASA assisted in conceiving the craft.

The same agency helped the Bond adventure Moonraker, allowing research visits to and shooting at its facilities and sight of proposals for space stations whose cylindrical components informed the final design of villain Drax’s orbital lair. Their angular arrangement, however, was inspired by a child’s mobile, visual interest overriding strict accuracy. Conversely the Tiangong complex featured in the intimate disaster movie Gravity was planned by China for the coming decade but at the time comprised only a single module circling Earth; the production extrapolated logically for its architecture of cylinders connected by nodes. Psychological drama Love replicates the long-established International Space Station, including – in a structure with no meaningful ceiling or floor – an interior whose every surface is utilised. With a miniscule budget, scavenged scrap and consumer products were carefully employed for this illusion. Less anchored in reality is the version of the ISS seen in action horror Life, one with smoother surfaces and where the size and solidity of viewports and panels are plot- rather than life-critical.

The Mars-bound Capricorn One appeared familiar to those raised on America’s Moon shots, lending believability to this post-Watergate conspiracy thriller. The characters’ terse transmissions and solemn saluting may have been counterfeit but the equipment itself was – more or less – genuine as NASA, where the film’s director and producer both had contacts, once again facilitated. The organisation provided technical support for the simulated launch of an Apollo-era rocket stack and a lunar lander – a mock-up, fittingly – for sequences ‘on’ the red planet.

The cylinder and the tube are strong, easy to construct and simple to rotate, the better to induce artificial gravity. Allegorically, their underlying form – the circle – has widespread and profound meaning across world cultures, representing concepts of infinity and self-discovery. All of these aspects are caught in the majestic 2001: A Space Odyssey with its multi-stage journey from Earth via the Moon to Jupiter and onward. Bridging such distances requires more effort, in reality and on the screen, and so a gently spinning Space Station 5 and the Jupiter-bound ship Discovery, its crew quarters occupying a centrifuge, were realised with the contributions of industrial designers, scientists and illustrators alike. The result is an intently thought-through world in which man has obtained mastery over time and space but not yet his purpose or destiny.

Fifteen years later a sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, foregrounded the tensions of the Cold War even as it extended the original film’s setting (to encompass Jupiter’s moon Europa) and spiritual ideas. As such new ship the Leonov retained the concept of a centrifuge but was massive, awkward and textured; a utilitarian aesthetic was applied to the inside, which was lit mainly by computer consoles and displays. Both helped set up a visual opposition to the bright elegance of the Discovery and represent the perceived technology level of the Soviet Union. Similarly the shuttle serving a mining complex on Io, another of Jupiter’s moons, in gritty thriller Outland was part of a wider ambiance for the film inspired by “the building of the Alaska pipeline, or the day-to-day operations right now on off-shore oil rigs” according to its writer-director. An industrial look of gratings, exposed metal and prefabrication included harsh lighting by a cinematographer whose only previous experience was a punk musical.

A fleet of commercial freighters orbiting Saturn for a purpose supported neither by their crews nor, it transpires, their client is the basis for eco-drama Silent Running. Budgetary considerations may again have been the primary driver, but selection of a decommissioned aircraft carrier as the location for shooting interior scenes provided real verisimilitude for a lone rebel taking action against the cynical apathy of his colleagues. In horror film Event Horizon the Lewis and Clark is heading for Neptune, at the far edge of the Solar System. Although an interior of moulded panels and modular corridors was by now familiar a stylised darkness inf(l)ected the design of this vessel, suiting the extreme theme.

**2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT (1984)**

The sense of isolation deepens in interstellar space, a region known only to unmanned probes in reality. Another team of jaded professionals manning a well-used tug find their routine interrupted by the eponymous Alien; once more, a lone agitator takes charge. This time certain of the Nostromo’s spaces convey a specific mood – a cramped, business-like bridge, a womb-like computer room, dripping, steam-drenched bilges. Sets built with ceilings, a rarity, promoted the necessary claustrophobia. The circle returns in the design of the metaphysical Solaris, where a scientist arrives to assess a research station orbiting the titular world. His discovery that the planet conjures memories of the dead to haunt the living, driving some to a fatal future, confirms the symbolism of the motif. A rather different atmosphere is the goal in romantic drama Passengers, as a couple are revived prematurely aboard deep-space ‘sleeper ship’ Avalon. Far more consciously science fictional in its overall appearance, the extravagant, organic interior spaces are based on contemporary hotel, retail and apartment design right down to flora in the central atrium.

In a galaxy far, far away occurred the swashbuckling adventure that was Star Wars. Created by a generation familiar with home-built hot rod cars but also a superpower arraying exotic weaponry against a supposedly inferior enemy, it featured the clinically monochrome curves of the Death Star – the circle again – as well the patched and customised Millennium Falcon.

Far from his home world or hovering a few hundred miles above it, man continues to explore, illuminate and imagine. Architecture provides him with a refuge in which to do all three, revealing – on film – what is here at least as often as what is out there.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

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Beyond the Frame #22: Long Shot

Interiors