Interview with Bill Irwin in the New York Times today:
Voicing a Robot — and Schlepping It Around, Too
By CARA BUCKLEY
As anyone who has seen “Interstellar” can attest, it’s not difficult to get attached to TARS, the semi-snarky, heroic robot who rarely strays from Matthew McConaughey’s side — even when they get sucked into a black hole! And even after that!
C-3P0, R2-D2 and Wilson the volleyball in “Castaway” are among the other cinematic nonhuman entities that evoked similar emotional reactions in the Bagger in days past. But back to “Interstellar” (which is up for five Oscars, including best sound editing and mixing) and TARS, which kind of looks like a giant metal M with an extra leg. It was voiced by Bill Irwin, the actor-comedian-clown. The Bagger wondered: was it hard for Mr. Irwin, physical genius that he is, to play only a voice?
Well, as the Bagger learned, Mr. Irwin was not merely TARS’s voice (though he did a fine job with that, envisioning his character as a cross between a retired marine commander and a high school gym teacher). He also moved the thing – the 190-pound TARS thing – around.
“Little did I know that the voice was almost the smaller part of the role,” Mr. Irwin told the Bagger via phone, from a theater workspace in New York. “What I was laboring at was the pupeetering of that machine. It was huge.”
While it would’ve been vastly easier for Mr. Irwin to voice TARS at the end of the production, Mr. Irwin said that Christopher Nolan, “Interstellar’s” director, wanted Mr. Irwin in all the TARS scenes. He wanted the robot to be something the actors could relate with and talk to, as opposed to talking to an X taped on the ground.
“Actors hate that,” he said. “I was talking as well. It helped set the relationship between this machine, this semi-human personality, and the people who rely on it.”
So, even though his previous experience with puppetry was highly limited (he did appear a few times on “Sesame Street”), Mr. Irwin was given a hands-on crash course in maneuvering the giant thingamajig around. Attached to the TARS machine by 12- to 18-inch aluminum pieces that extended from his ankles and chest — “the dramaturgy of this gets very complex,” he said – Mr. Irwin spent weeks before production moving TARS around a dusty Burbank, Calif., shed with a stuntman.
TARS ended up getting heavier when a compressed air system was added so the robot could be lifted and moved. “I sort of felt like an old dray horse, clicking in,” Mr. Irwin said. “That was some heavy schlepping.”
There were some near mishaps, namely a scene in which TARS is leaning over Mr. McConaughey, demanding how he found the coordinates to a secret NASA station.
“I nearly dropped the machine on McConaughey a few times,” Mr. Irwin said. “So I’d say, ‘Cut, cut, cut!”
While Mr. Irwin did not play the role of CASE, a TARS twin that executed a sensational rescue of Anne Hathaway’s character as an enormous wave came crashing down, he did maneuver CASE around for what turned out to his final scene. Ms. Hathaway’s character is on a far-off dry, dusty planet – it was filmed in the desert outside Los Angeles – and way, way in the distance is CASE, moving toward one of their little out-buildings.
“That was my last day of work,” Mr. Irwin said, “A backward walk, waving goodbye.”
