Interstellar

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30 Jan 2024
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InterstellarTheatrical release poster

CinematographyHoyte van HoytemaEdited byLee SmithMusic byHans ZimmerProduction

LanguageEnglishBudget$165 million[3]Box office$731 million[3]
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film co-written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, and Matt Damon. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is embroiled in a catastrophic blight and famine, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humankind.
Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay, which had its origins in a script Jonathan developed in 2007 and was originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist and 2017 Nobel laureate in Physics,[4] was an executive producer, acted as a scientific consultant, and wrote a tie-in book, The Science of Interstellar. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on 35 mm movie film in the Panavision anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm. Principal photography began in late 2013 and took place in Alberta, Iceland, and Los Angeles. Interstellar uses extensive practical and miniature effects, and the company Double Negative created additional digital effects.
Interstellar premiered in Los Angeles on October 26, 2014. In the United States, it was first released on film stock, expanding to venues using digital projectors. The film received positive reviews from critics and grossed over $681 million worldwide ($703 million after subsequent re-releases), making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. It has been praised by astronomers for its scientific accuracy and portrayal of theoretical astrophysics.[5][6][7] Interstellar was nominated for five awards at the 87th Academy Awards, winning Best Visual Effects, and received numerous other accolades.

Plot[edit]

In the near future, humanity is facing extinction following a global famine caused by ecocide.[8] Cooper's family, which includes his children, Tom and Murph, and his father-in-law Donald, survive by pursuing farming, much like most of humanity. One evening after a dust storm, Cooper discovers a gravitational anomaly inside Murph's bedroom, which creates patterns of falling particles. The pattern resolves into GPS coordinates, which leads Cooper and Murph to a secret NASA facility.
NASA is believed to have shut down but continues to operate, its latest mission being to find a habitable planet beyond the solar system. A team is preparing to travel through a wormhole near Saturn, leading to a faraway galaxy that has three potentially habitable planets, each orbiting the supermassive blackhole called Gargantua. Cooper is asked by Dr. Brand, the lead scientist, to pilot the crew due to past experience. Cooper struggles to leave behind Murph, but agrees after promising her that he will return. Heartbroken, Murph acts cold towards Cooper, and refuses to say goodbye. The Endurance spacecraft takes off with three other NASA scientists − Romilly, Doyle and Brand's daughter Amelia − as well as two intelligent robots, TARS and CASE.
Past the wormhole, the crew arrive at the first planet, an ocean world with massive tidal waves. Doyle is swept away within minutes, but Cooper and Amelia survive a round of waves to return to the Endurance. Though they were only gone a few hours, they find that 23 years have passed due to time dilation. Back on Earth, an adult Murph, who is still mad at Cooper, is helping Dr. Brand formulate an equation to solve the problem of mass exodus — transporting Earth's population off the planet while escaping its gravity. On his deathbed, Brand reveals that the equation is unsolvable. Murph is left alone to continue his work and turns to her childhood bedroom as the source of the initial anomaly, to look for clues. She comes across the wrist-watch Cooper gave her before he left on her bookshelf.
On the second planet, the crew find the planet's previous NASA explorer, Dr. Mann, still alive and in cryostasis. They awaken him, and learn that the planet has positive data linked to habitability. On a scouting mission, however, Mann confesses to having lied so that someone might come and rescue him from the ice-world planet. He sets off a chain of events that results in Romilly's death. He takes the Endurance crew's lander and attempts to seize control of the Endurance. However, TARS removed his security clearance to successfully do so, but Mann persists. This attempt leads to his death and a portion of Endurance exploding. Cooper and Amelia regain control of the craft, but, with limited resources, must chart a gravity-assist path around Gargantua to propel the craft to the third planet. At the last moment, Cooper detaches himself and TARS so that Amelia may reach the final planet safely. He and TARS fall beyond the black hole's event horizon.
Inside, Cooper and TARS find a mysterious five-dimensional tesseract where time is a physical dimension. Cooper is able to use gravity to communicate with his past self, and realizes he sent himself the NASA coordinates, initiating this mission. He realizes that the goal is to feed Murph the blackhole gravity-data to help her solve the equation, and encodes the data into the ticking pattern of his wristwatch. Murph finds the watch on her visit there and uses it to solve Brand's equation. The tesseract dissolves, ejecting Cooper and TARS through the wormhole and into Saturn's orbit again, where a present-day (22nd century CE) space-faring O'Neill cylinder picks them up.
Cooper awakens inside a hospital and is reunited with an aging Murph, who is now considerably older than him. Murph asks that Cooper leave her and instead find Amelia. Cooper and TARS set off for the third planet, where Amelia is directing the setup of a new colony in the planet's desert-like environment. Alone on the habitable planet, she takes off her helmet and breathes in the air.

Cast[edit]

Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway played the protagonists of Interstellar.

Production[edit]

Crew[edit]

Development and financing[edit]

The premise for Interstellar was conceived by the producer Lynda Obst and the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who collaborated on the film Contact (1997), and had known each other since Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date.[9][10] The two conceived a scenario, based on Thorne's work, about "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans", and attracted Steven Spielberg's interest in directing.[11] The film began development in June 2006, when Spielberg and Paramount Pictures announced plans for a science-fiction film based on an eight-page treatment written by Obst and Thorne. Obst was attached to produce.[12][13] By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay.[14]
After Spielberg moved his production studio, DreamWorks, from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios in 2009, Paramount needed a new director for Interstellar. Jonathan Nolan recommended his brother Christopher, who joined the project in 2012.[15] Christopher Nolan met with Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use of spacetime in the story.[16] In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan was in negotiations to direct Interstellar.[17] Nolan said he wanted to encourage the goal of human spaceflight,[18] and intended to merge his brother's screenplay with his own.[19] By the following March, Nolan was confirmed to direct Interstellar, which would be produced under his label Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions.[20] The Hollywood Reporter said Nolan would earn a salary of $20 million against 20% of the total gross.[21] To research for the film, Nolan visited NASA and the private space program at SpaceX.[16]
Warner Bros. sought a stake in Nolan's production of Interstellar from Paramount, despite their traditional rivalry, and agreed to give Paramount its rights to co-finance the next film in the Friday the 13th horror franchise, with a stake in a future film based on the television series South Park. Warner Bros. also agreed to let Paramount co-finance an indeterminate "A-list" property.[22] In August 2013, Legendary Pictures finalized an agreement with Warner Bros. to finance approximately 25% of the film's production. Although it failed to renew its eight-year production partnership with Warner Bros., Legendary reportedly agreed to forgo financing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) in exchange for the stake in Interstellar.[23]

Writing and casting[edit]

The Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930s, as documented by Ken Burns in The Dust Bowl (2012), served as inspiration for the blight.
Jonathan Nolan worked on the script for four years.[9] To learn the scientific aspects, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology.[24] He was pessimistic about the Space Shuttle program ending and how NASA lacked financing for a human mission to Mars, drawing inspiration from science-fiction films with apocalyptic themes, such as WALL-E (2008) and Avatar (2009). Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly said: "He set the story in a dystopian future ravaged by blight, but populated with hardy folk who refuse to bow to despair."[15] His brother Christopher had worked on other science fiction scripts but decided to take the Interstellar script and choose among the vast array of ideas presented by Jonathan and Thorne. He picked what he felt, as director, he could get "across to the audience and hopefully not lose them," before he merged it with a script he had worked on for years on his own.[16][25] Christopher kept in place Jonathan's conception of the first hour, which is set on a resource depleted Earth in the near future. The setting was inspired by the Dust Bowl that took place in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s.[9] He revised the rest of the script, where a team travels into space, instead.[9] After watching the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl for inspiration, Christopher contacted the director, Ken Burns, and the producer, Dayton Duncan. They granted him permission to use some of their featured interviews in Interstellar.[26]
Christopher Nolan wanted an actor who could bring to life his vision of the main character as an everyman with whom "the audience could experience the story."[27] He became interested in casting Matthew McConaughey after watching him in an early cut of the 2012 film Mud,[27] which he had seen as a friend of one of its producers, Aaron Ryder.[9] Nolan went to visit McConaughey while he was filming for the TV series True Detective.[28] Anne Hathaway was invited to Nolan's home, where she read the script for Interstellar.[29] In early 2013, both actors were cast in the starring roles.[30] Jessica Chastain was contacted while she was working on Miss Julie (2014) in Northern Ireland, and a script was delivered to her.[29] Originally, Irrfan Khan was offered the role of Dr. Mann but rejected it due to scheduling conflicts. Matt Damon was cast as Mann in late August 2013 and completed filming his scenes in Iceland.[31]

Principal photography[edit]

Nolan shot Interstellar on 35 mm film in the Panavision anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm photography.[32] Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema was hired for Interstellar, as Wally Pfister, Nolan's cinematographer on all of his previous films, was making his directorial debut working on Transcendence (2014);[33] Pfister would later retire as a cinematographer for films.[34] More IMAX cameras were used for Interstellar than for any of Nolan's previous films. To minimize the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI), Nolan had practical locations built, such as the interior of a space shuttle.[27] Van Hoytema retooled an IMAX camera to be hand-held for shooting interior scenes.[9] Some of the film's sequences were shot with an IMAX camera installed in the nose cone of a Learjet.[35] Nolan, who is known for keeping details of his productions secret, strove to ensure secrecy for Interstellar. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Ben Fritz stated, "The famously secretive filmmaker has gone to extreme lengths to guard the script to ... Interstellar, just as he did with the blockbuster Dark Knight trilogy."[36] As one security measure, Interstellar was filmed under the name Flora's Letter,[37] Flora being one of Nolan's four children with producer Emma Thomas.[16]
The Svínafellsjökull glacier in Iceland was used as a filming location for Interstellar, doubling for Mann's planet.
The film's principal photography was scheduled to last four months.[31] It began on August 6, 2013, in the province of Alberta, Canada.[23] Towns in Alberta where shooting took place included Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge, Fort Macleod, and Okotoks. In Okotoks, filming took place at the Seaman Stadium and the Olde Town Plaza.[37] For a cornfield scene, production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres (200 ha) of corn that would be destroyed in an apocalyptic dust storm scene,[15] intended to be similar to storms experienced during the Dust Bowl in 1930s America.[16] Additional scenes involving the dust storm and McConaughey's character were also shot in Fort Macleod, where the giant dust clouds were created on location using large fans to blow cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air.[38] Filming in the province lasted until September 9, 2013, and involved hundreds of extras in addition to 130 crew members, most of whom were local.[37]
Shooting also took place in Iceland, where Nolan had previously filmed scenes for Batman Begins (2005).[39] It was chosen to represent two extraterrestrial planets: one covered in ice, and the other in water.[9] The crew transported mock spaceships weighing about 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg).[16] They spent two weeks shooting there,[31] during which a crew of about 350 people, including 130 locals, worked on the film. Locations included the Svínafellsjökull glacier and the town of Klaustur.[40][41] While filming a water scene in Iceland, Hathaway almost suffered hypothermia because her dry suit had not been properly secured.[16]
After the schedule in Iceland was completed, the crew shot in Los Angeles for 54 days. Filming locations included the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, the Los Angeles Convention Center, a Sony Pictures soundstage in Culver City, and a private residence in Altadena, California.[42] Principal photography concluded in December 2013.[43] Production had a budget of $165 million, $10 million less than was allotted by Paramount, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures.[16]

Production design[edit]

The Endurance spacecraft (left) is based on the International Space Station (right).

Interstellar features three spacecraft— the Endurance, a ranger, and a lander. The Endurance, the crew's mother ship, is a circular structure consisting of 12 capsules, laid flat to mimic a clock: Four capsules with planetary settling equipment, four with engines, and four with the permanent functions of cockpit, medical labs, and habitation. Production designer Nathan Crowley said the Endurance was based on the International Space Station: "It's a real mish-mash of different kinds of technology. You need analogue stuff, as well as digital stuff, you need backup systems and tangible switches. It's really like a submarine in space. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose." The ranger's function is similar to the Space Shuttle's, being able to enter and exit planetary atmospheres. Lastly, the lander transports the capsules with settling equipment to planetary surfaces. Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter."[9]
The film features two robots, CASE and TARS, as well as a dismantled third robot, KIPP. Nolan wanted to avoid making the robots anthropomorphic and chose a 1.5 m (4.9 ft) quadrilateral design. He said: "It has a very complicated design philosophy. It's based on mathematics. You've got four main blocks and they can be joined in three ways. So, you have three combinations you follow. But then within that, it subdivides into a further three joints. And all the places we see lines—those can subdivide further. So you can unfold a finger, essentially, but it's all proportional." Bill Irwin voiced and physically controlled both robots, with his image digitally removed, and Josh Stewart replaced his voicing for CASE.[9] The human space habitats resemble O'Neill cylinders, a theoretical space habitat model proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.[44]

Sound design[edit]

Gregg Landaker and Gary Rizzo were the film's audio engineers tasked with audio mixing, while sound editor Richard King supervised the process.[45] Christopher Nolan sought to mix the sound to take maximum advantage of theater equipment[46] and paid close attention to designing the sound mix, like focusing on the sound of buttons being pressed with astronaut suit gloves.[15] The studio's website stated that the film was "mixed to maximize the power of the low-end frequencies in the main channels, as well as in the subwoofer channel."[47] Nolan deliberately intended some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music, causing some theaters to post notices emphasizing that this effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.[48]

Music[edit]

Main article: Interstellar (soundtrack)
Hans Zimmer, who scored Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception (2010), returned to score Interstellar. Nolan chose not to provide Zimmer with a script or any plot details but instead gave him a single page that told the story of a father leaving his child for work. It was through this connection that Zimmer created the early stages of the Interstellar soundtrack. Zimmer and Nolan later decided the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ of the Temple Church, London, would be the primary instrument for the score.[49][50] Zimmer conducted 45 scoring sessions for Interstellar, three times more than for Inception. The soundtrack was released on November 18, 2014.[15]

Visual effects[edit]

The visual effects company Double Negative, which worked on Inception, was brought back for Interstellar.[51] According to visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin, the number of effects in the film was not much greater than in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or Inception. However, for Interstellar, they created the effects first, allowing digital projectors to display them behind the actors, rather than having the actors perform in front of green screens.[9] The film contained 850 visual-effect shots at a resolution of 5600 × 4000 lines: 150 shots that were created in-camera using digital projectors, and another 700 were created in post-production. Of those, 620 were presented in IMAX, while the rest were anamorphic.[52]
The ranger, Endurance, and lander spacecraft were created using miniature effects by Nathan Crowley in collaboration with effects company New Deal Studios, as opposed to using computer-generated imagery, as Nolan felt they offered the best way to give the ships a tangible presence in space. 3D-printed and hand-sculpted, the scale models earned the nickname "maxatures" by the crew due to their immense size; the 1/15th-scale miniature of the Endurance module spanned over 7.6 m (25 ft), while a pyrotechnic model of part of the craft was built at 1/5th scale. The Ranger and Lander miniatures spanned 14 m (46 ft) and over 15 m (49 ft), respectively, and were large enough for van Hoytema to mount IMAX cameras directly onto the spacecraft, thus mimicking the look of NASA IMAX documentaries. The models were then attached to a six-axis gimbal on a motion control system that allowed an operator to manipulate their movements, which were filmed against background plates of space using VistaVision cameras on a smaller motion control rig.[53] New Deal Studio's miniatures were used in 150 special effects shots.[52]

Influences[edit]

Nolan was influenced by what he called "key touchstones" of science fiction cinema, including Metropolis (1927), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982),[54] Star Wars (1977), and Alien (1979).[55] Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975) influenced "elemental things in the story to do with wind and dust and water", according to Nolan,[56] who also compared Interstellar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as a film about human nature.[57] He sought to emulate films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) for being family-friendly but also "as edgy and incisive and challenging as anything else on the blockbuster spectrum". He screened The Right Stuff (1983) for the crew before production,[9] following in its example by capturing reflections on the Interstellar astronauts' visors. For further inspiration, Nolan invited former astronaut Marsha Ivins to the set.[16] Nolan and his crew studied the IMAX NASA documentaries of filmmaker Toni Myers for visual reference of spacefaring missions, and strove to imitate their use of IMAX cameras in the enclosed spaces of spacecraft interiors.[58] Clark Kent's upbringing in Man of Steel (2013) was the inspiration for the farm setting in the Midwest.[25] Apart from the films, Nolan drew inspiration from the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.[16]

Scientific accuracy[edit]

Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate, served as scientific consultant and executive producer.
Regarding the concepts of wormholes and black holes, Kip Thorne said he "worked on the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein's general relativity equations".[59] Early in the process, Thorne laid down two guidelines: "First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations ... would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter." Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of making the film.[13] At one point, Thorne spent two weeks arguing Nolan out of having a character traveling faster than light before Nolan finally gave up.[60] According to Thorne, the element that has the highest degree of artistic freedom is the clouds of ice on one of the planets they visit, which are structures that would go beyond the material strength that ice could support.[13]
The astrobiologist David Grinspoon criticized the dire "blight" situation on Earth portrayed in the early scenes, pointing out that even with a voracious blight it would have taken millions of years to reduce the atmosphere's oxygen content. He also notes that gravity should have pulled down the ice clouds.[61] Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, explored the science behind the ending of Interstellar, concluding that it is theoretically possible to interact with the past, and that "we don't really know what's in a black hole, so take it and run with it".[62] The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku praised the film for its scientific accuracy and said Interstellar "could set the gold standard for science fiction movies for years to come". Timothy Reyes, a former NASA software engineer, said "Thorne's and Nolan's accounting of black holes and wormholes and the use of gravity is excellent".[63]

Wormholes and black holes[edit]

Miller's planet orbiting Gargantua
To create the visual effects for the wormhole and a rotating, supermassive black hole (possessing an ergosphere, as opposed to a non-rotating black hole), Thorne collaborated with Franklin and a team of 30 people at Double Negative, providing pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the engineers, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totaling 800 terabytes of data.[10] Thorne described the accretion disk of the black hole as "anemic and at low temperature[64]—about the temperature of the surface of the sun," allowing it to emit appreciable light, but not enough gamma radiation and X-rays to threaten nearby astronauts and planets.[65] The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, resulting in the publication of three scientific papers.[66][67][68]
The first image of the event horizon of a black hole, obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope. The asymmetric brightness of the accretion disk is well visible here.
Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole would not be visually comprehensible to an audience, and would require the effects team to unrealistically alter its appearance. The visual representation of the black hole in the film does not account for the Doppler effect which, when added by the visual effects team, resulted in an asymmetrically lit black and blue-black hole, the purpose of which Nolan thought the audience would not understand. As a result, it was omitted in the finished product.[69] Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable, as long as he maintained consistent camera perspectives.[70]
As a reference, the asymmetric brightness of the accretion disk is very well visible in the first image[71] of the event horizon of a black hole obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope team in 2019. Futura-Sciences praised the correct depiction of the Penrose process.[72]
According to Space.com, the portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy.[73]

Marketing[edit]

The teaser trailer for Interstellar debuted December 13, 2013, and featured clips related to space exploration, accompanied by a voiceover by Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper.[74] The theatrical trailer debuted May 5, 2014, at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater in Washington, D.C., and was made available online later that month. For the week ending on May 19, it was the most-viewed film trailer, with over 19.5 million views on YouTube.[75]
Christopher Nolan and McConaughey made their first appearances at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2014 to promote Interstellar. That same month, Paramount Pictures launched an interactive website, on which users uncovered a star chart related to the Apollo 11 Moon landing.[76]
In October 2014, Paramount partnered with Google to promote Interstellar across multiple platforms.[77] The film's website was relaunched as a digital hub hosted on a Google domain,[78] which collected feedback from film audiences, and linked to a mobile app.[78] It featured a game in which players could build Solar System models and use a flight simulator for space travel.[79] The Paramount–Google partnership also included a virtual time capsule compiled with user-generated content, made available in 2015.[80] The initiative Google for Education used the film as a basis for promoting math and science lesson plans in schools.[77][81]
Paramount provided a virtual reality walkthrough of the Endurance spacecraft using Oculus Rift technology. It hosted the walkthrough sequentially in New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., from October 6 through November 19, 2014.[82][83] The publisher Running Press released Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space, a book by Mark Cotta Vaz about the making of the film, on November 11.[84] W. W. Norton & Company released The Science of Interstellar, a book by Thorne;[85] Titan Books released the official novelization, written by Greg Keyes;[86] and Wired magazine released a tie-in online comic, Absolute Zero, written by Christopher Nolan and drawn by Sean Gordon Murphy. The comic is a prequel to the film, with Mann as the protagonist.[87]

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