Christopher Nolan is undoubtedly is one of the best film makers in the world. Let’s talk about his film: Interstellar.
The tesseract scene (which looks like a giant library and allows Cooper to access his daughter’s bookshelf in the past) bears some resemblance to the concept of L-space as described in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. L-space (short for Library space) is the principle that the mass of information contained in a large collection of books warps space and time, and in consequence a sufficiently large library allows the visitor to access any library anywhere in space and time.
Steven Spielberg was set to direct the film in 2006 and hired Jonathan Nolan to write the screenplay. In 2012, after Spielberg’s departure, Jonathan suggested the project to his brother, Christopher.
Not only does Interstellar feature the most ever footage shot using 15/70mm IMAX cameras for a feature film, but due to the film industries rapid conversion to digital projection formats, Interstellar will potentially be the last film ever to be projected on 15/70mm IMAX film.
The character of Murph was originally a boy in early drafts of the script. Murph’s name is said 79 times in the film.
- The wormhole shown in this film near Saturn is exactly the same place shown in Man of Steel (2013), produced by Christopher Nolan. In Man of Steel (2013), Superman as a child arrives into our solar system in a spaceship when it drops out of warp.
- The method of space travel in this film was based on physicist Kip Thorne’s works, which were also the basis for the method of space travel in Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact”, and the resulting film adaptation, Contact (1997). Matthew McConaughey stars in both films.
Early in pre-production, Dr. Kip Thorne laid down two guidelines to strictly follow: nothing would violate established physical laws, and that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the creative mind of a screenwriter. Christopher Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of the making of the movie. That did not prevent clashes, though; at one point Thorne spent two weeks talking Nolan out of an idea about travelling faster than light.
To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, who then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to 800 terabytes of data. The resulting VFX provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers: one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community.
For a cornfield scene, Christopher Nolan sought to grow 500 acres of corn, which he learned was feasible from his producing of Man of Steel (2013). The corn was then sold and he actually made a profit.
Christopher Nolan cast Matthew McConaughey after seeing his performance in Mud (2012). Nolan recalled, “I didn’t know how much potential he had until I saw Mud. Not just as a leading man, but sheer acting talent.”
The majority of shots of the robot TARS were not computer generated. Rather TARS was a practical puppet controlled and voiced on set by Bill Irwin who was then digitally erased from the film. Irwin also puppeteered the robot CASE, but in that instance had his voice dubbed over by Josh Stewart.
Since the movie is 169 minutes long and costs approximately $165 million to make, it therefore carries a price tag of approximately $976,000 per minute.
