Interstellar: Iceland's Glaciers and Alberta's Farms

Interstellar opens in a near future where humanity faces extinction from dust storms and crop blights, and Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot, works as a farmer raising his children. The parent-teacher conference scene was shot at Longview School, 128 Morrison Road, in Longview. Cooper's ranch-house was built for the film nearby, about 35 miles south of Calgary, and production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of corn for the dust-storm scenes. The Alberta shoot began on 6 August 2013.

A baseball game is brought to a premature end by one of the increasingly frequent dust storms threatening the planet. The scene was filmed at Seaman Stadium in Okotoks, Alberta, and at nearby Tourmaline Field, with Matthew McConaughey, John Lithgow and Timothée Chalamet in the cast. The same shoot also used Okotoks' Olde Town Plaza.

The Cooper family drives through town as the storm rolls in, and the film's giant dust clouds were created on location, with large fans blowing cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air. The town is Fort Macleod; the street seen in the film is its Main Street. The storm is meant to recall the Dust Bowl of 1930s America. The Alberta shoot involved hundreds of extras and 130 crew members, most of them local, and ended on 9 September 2013.

Location precision: The street seen on screen is Fort Macleod's Main Street, but the pin marks the town centre rather than a surveyed spot on the street.

After the storm, Cooper recognizes the dust patterns in Murph's room as binary code giving coordinates. Responding to the mysterious messages, the Coopers take the Spray Lakes Road from Canmore, and the entrance to the secret facility was built at the Goat Creek parking lot, beneath Ha Ling Peak. The coordinates lead them to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand.

Location precision: The film set stood in the Goat Creek parking lot, which is not itself mapped here; the pin marks Ha Ling Peak above it.

Inside the hidden base, Professor Brand explains that 48 years earlier a wormhole appeared near Saturn, and Cooper is enlisted to pilot the Endurance through it. The cavernous NASA interior, with its circular balconies, is the enormous lobby of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel at 404 South Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. It took three weeks to build the giant set, which towered up to Level 6, and just three days to shoot the scenes. The crew shot in Los Angeles for 54 days.

Iceland was chosen to represent two extraterrestrial planets, one covered in ice and the other in water. On the water world, Miller's planet, the crew land in knee-high water, and Cooper and Brand return to find that 23 years have elapsed on the Endurance. The location guide names Orrustuhóll in the Eldhraun lava field as one of the two main filming sites. It lies about nine miles northeast of Kirkjubaejarklaustur, on land inundated by one of the largest lava flows in the country's history. In Iceland the crew hauled mock spaceships of about 10,000 pounds.

Location precision: The guide names Orrustuhóll as a main filming site but not which planet's scenes were shot there; the pin marks the Eldhraun lava field.

On Mann's frozen world, Dr Mann attempts to kill Cooper and reveals that he falsified his data in the hope of being rescued. The icy planet is Svínafellsjökull, a small glacier at the southern edge of Vatnajökull, east of Skaftafell. A filming day there was cancelled over safety concerns, so close-ups of the fight were shot in a motel parking lot painted to resemble the glacier. The crew spent two weeks in Iceland, with about 350 people working on the film.