by Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic has become his most beloved film: the most logged movie on letterboxd, one guaranteed to pull a crowd whenever it is screened in 1570.
Here is, Interstellar Movie Trivia.
THE STORY ORIGINATED WITH A FAMOUS PHYSICIST
Kip Thorne is an American physicist, best known for his work on black holes. He has been called the world’s foremost expert on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, in 2017 he won the Nobel Prize for his work on gravity waves.
In 1997, Thorne worked on the movie ‘Contact’ as a consultant. The film was a kind of proto ‘Interstellar’: based on a novel by astronomer Carl Sagan, director Robert Zemeckis wanted to add some real science to a story about intelligent aliens contacting the Earth.
Thorne enjoyed his experience, and subsequently wanted to develop his own project.
His idea also involved first alien contact, wormholes, and the human exploration of space. He teamed up with producer Lynda Obst, who he met on Contact, and wrote an 8 page story outline, which the pair shopped around Hollywood.
It was eventually purchased by Paramount Studios. Thorne would later write a book – ‘The Science of Interstellar’ – about his involvement with the movie.
STEVEN SPIELBERG WAS ATTACHED TO DIRECT
Thorne’s story came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who signed on as director.
This immediately made the film viable. Spielberg was the most commercially successful director of all time, with a proven track record in large-scale sci-fi.
To flesh out the story, Spielberg hired Jonathan Nolan, Chris’ brother, to develop a screenplay. Neither Nolan was well known at the time: Jonathan was an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter, Chris was trying to get his own projects off the ground.
Spielberg’s production company, Dreamworks, was then attached to Paramount. But while the film was in pre-production he moved to Disney.
As Paramount owned the rights to Thorne’s story, Spielberg had to drop out.
THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT WAS VERY DIFFERENT
Jonathan would then pitch the idea to his brother. The pair would re-write the screenplay, the first draft of which was very different to the final film.
The basic set up was the same: The Blight, the slowly dying Earth, the discovery of a wormhole and planned interstellar mission.
But in the original draft, we have not sent any astronauts through the wormhole, just unmanned probes. And when our intrepid team aboard Endurance go through, they find only one planet, not three; an ice world, similar to the one Matt Damon is trapped on in the final version.
The ice planet is not deserted: as the team explore, they find an underground base, populated by autonomous Chinese robots. It turns out, the Chinese had discovered the wormhole as well, and beaten the US to launching a mission.
The robots force the astronauts to flee, when they return to space they find the original wormhole is connected to a network of them.
Exploring these, the crew eventually find themselves in a place somehow outside the universe. Long deserted, this mysterious location appears to have been developed by a vastly superior intelligence.
The team finally return to earth, due to time dilation many hundreds of years have passed. The Blight has done its worst, and humanity is now extinct.
The story then returns closer to the film we know.
The team figure out how to use the wormhole network to travel back in time, and send the required gravitational information to Cooper’s son Murph (yes, Murph was a boy in the original).
Rather than the 4D tesseract, their means is a re-programmed drone. There is a trace of this left in the final film: this is the drone that Coop’s family chase down near the start.
In the original script, this was later revealed to have the gravity info stored within it, which is what made it go haywire.
THE TITLE WAS CHANGED TOO
The working title for the Nolan’s version of the script was ‘Flora’s Letter’. Chris gave Coop another child, a daughter called Flora, and imagined her writing him a heartfelt letter, describing how much she missed him while he was in space.
This was the beginning of the film becoming more emotional, and more focussed on Coop’s relationship with his children. Neither of these elements were prominent in the original script.
Flora would eventually evolve into Murph, and take on the role of the scientist who solves the gravitational equations.
Nolan’s daughter is also named Flora. His filmography is full of references to his own life; characters named after his wife, kids and family, and events mirroring things that have happened to him and his brothers.
HANS ZIMMER WROTE THE SCORE BEFORE FILMING STARTED
German composer Hans Zimmer has worked on all of Nolan’s films since ‘Batman Begins’, in 2005.
For ‘Interstellar’, Nolan wanted the score before filming started, as he wanted to use the music to help shape the story. This is the reverse of how it usually works; the composer is normally given a near complete film, to fit the music to.
As the script was unfinished, Nolan gave Zimmer ‘Flora’s Letter’, and his notes on the story. He also asked him to avoid instruments usually associated with space movies, like electronic music, or big drumbeats.
Instead, Zimmer crafted a score featuring lush orchestration, unusual percussion, and a lot of organs; a rich and distinctive series of tracks that has become iconic in its own right.
THE TALKING HEADS ARE REAL DUST BOWL SURVIVORS
At different times in the film, clips are shown of older people talking about the difficulty of farming during The Blight.
In reality, these are actual survivors of the Dust Bowl that ravaged American agriculture in the 1930s. The clips are taken from a Ken Burns directed documentary series, called ‘The Dust Bowl’, which aired on PBS in 2012.
The only exception is actress Ellen Burstyn, who appears in the clips and also plays older Murph, in the final scene.
REAL CORNFIELDS WERE PLANTED IN OREGON
Christopher Nolan is famous for doing things ‘in camera’, eschewing digital effects in favour of practical methods. He is also known for an obsessive attention to detail.
In the world of Interstellar, our future society has become heavily reliant on corn, amid a global food shortage.
To emphasize that Earth is running out of farmland, and so food, Nolan took the production to Oregon, and planted 500 acres of real corn. The crops were planted in the shadow of a mountain range, in an area not usually used for agriculture.
The idea was intended to work on an almost subliminal level. That the audience would pick up on the fact that the corn is not meant to be there, even if they are not farming experts, which would add to the end-of-days atmosphere.
When production wrapped, the corn was harvested, sold, and turned a tidy profit.
TARS AND CASE ARE REAL TOO
Nolan’s preference for practical effects is also on display with the movie’s robots, TARS and CASE. In any other movie, these characters would almost certainly have been CGI, but Nolan actually had the props built.
Actor Bill Irwin – who also voices TARS – operated them manually onset, manipulating their limbs and moving them around physically. He was later digitally removed from the film to complete the effect.
THE BOOKCASE BOOKS ARE SIGNIFICANT
The bookcase where Murph’s ‘ghost’ lives, and where Cooper is later trapped, features a number of books, that were handpicked by the director.
These include (with quotes from Nolan):
- Selected Poems by T.S.Eliot: ‘Concepts of time and space at their most complex are sometimes best expressed through art rather than science. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ are as thought-provoking about time as any scientific text.’
- The Stand by Stephen King: ‘A bleak scenario that hammers home the fact that our perspective on momentous events will always be intimate.’
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle: ‘My introduction to the idea of higher dimensions, including the notion of a tesseract.’
- The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks: ‘Once read, never forgotten, a strangely moving, horrible tale of a child and father living in near isolation.’
- Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges: ‘The name says it all.’
THERE ARE A NUMBER OF FAMOUS ACTORS IN BIT PARTS
‘Interstellar’ has a stacked cast, and is one of those movies where the one scene parts are often delivered by notable actors:
- Timothee Chalamet: Years before he starred in ‘Call Me By Your Name’, Chalamet had a significant early career role playing young Tom, Coop’s son.
- David Oyelowo: The same year he received an Oscar nomination playing Martin Luther King jr in a big budget biopic, Oyelowo also played ‘School Principal’ in one scene.
- Ellen Burstyn: As mentioned above, Academy Award winning legend Ellen Burstyn plays old Murph in the hospital scene at the end of the film.
- Brooke Smith: Smith is best known for a role much earlier in her career; she plays the woman held captive in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, the ‘it puts the lotion on its skin’ girl. In this she plays the nurse, who ushers Coop in to see old Murph.
In addition, cast and grew snuck some family members in:
- Flora Nolan: Nolan’s daughter has a brief cameo as ‘Girl on the Truck’ (pictured above), the young woman that Jessica Chastain stares at, before she decides to turn around set the corn field on fire.
- Matthew McConaughey’s daughters: Two of his daughters are in the hospital room with old Murph at the end of the movie, as part of the extended Cooper family.
IT SET A RECORD FOR THE HIGHEST AMOUNT OF 1570 IMAX FILM USED
1570 is the biggest type of film stock ever mass produced. It is made by the IMAX Corporation in Japan, specifically to be used in IMAX cameras and projectors.
Difficult and expensive to use, it has also become a Nolan trademark; the director has used the technology extensively since ‘Batman Begins’.
Nolan and his production team redesigned and rebuilt the IMAX equipment, to make it easier to use. His custom cameras were deployed by ace DP Hoyte van Hoytema, who filmed about 80% of ‘Interstellar’ in IMAX.
At the time, this set a record for the largest amount of IMAX footage used in a single film. Nolan would subsequently break his own record, making ‘Oppenheimer’.
Re-screenings of ‘Interstellar’ in 1570 regularly draw large crowds.
