Interstellar (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Interstellar, the 2014 science fiction epic directed by Christopher Nolan, was filmed under a decoy name: Flora's Letter. Flora is one of Nolan's four children with producer Emma Thomas. Nolan is famous for guarding his productions, and the cover title was one of the measures he took to protect the script, just as he had on the Dark Knight trilogy. Behind the disguise sat a very large film. It follows astronauts who search for a new home for humanity while Earth suffers from blight and famine. Its cast was led by Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn and Michael Caine. How did a project first pitched to Steven Spielberg end up in Nolan's hands? How did a theoretical physicist's equations decide what a black hole looks like on screen? Why did some theaters feel the need to tell audiences that muffled dialogue was no fault of their equipment? And how did a film with real detractors turn, a decade later, into something many viewers call a classic?

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• 2. The Story On Screen

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  The year is 2067, and life on Earth is collapsing. Earlier NASA missions, known as Lazarus, reported habitable worlds in faraway systems, reachable through a wormhole near Saturn. Cooper, a former NASA pilot played by McConaughey, is led to the agency's secret facility by a coincidence he refuses to call supernatural. There, mission leader John Brand, the father of scientist Amelia Brand, persuades him to join. Over the objections of his young daughter Murph, Cooper leaves to pilot the spacecraft Endurance.

  After a two-year voyage to Saturn, the crew passes through the wormhole into a system that orbits a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. Three planets, explored earlier by Miller, Mann and Edmunds, show signs of habitability. Miller's planet turns out to be an ocean world with massive tidal waves. Doyle dies there. Cooper and Amelia escape and return to the Endurance, but 23 Earth-years have passed because the planet sits so close to Gargantua's gravity. Romilly, who waited alone aboard, has aged significantly.

  The crew now turns to Mann's planet and gives up on ever visiting Edmunds. A message from Earth says that Brand has died. On his deathbed, he told Murph, by then a scientist herself, that the Endurance was never meant to return, because humanity's life on Earth was doomed. Cooper decides to go home, and Mann tries to stop him. Mann had falsified the data about his planet in the hope of being rescued. Romilly is killed in the struggle, and Mann dies in space, leaving only Amelia and Cooper alive.

  With a damaged ship and few supplies, Cooper proposes a gravitational slingshot around Gargantua toward Edmunds' planet. It would save fuel but cost more than 50 Earth-years. At the last moment he ejects himself from the Endurance so that Amelia can finish the mission. He falls into the black hole and lands in a tesseract, a place where time is a physical dimension. From there he sees himself decades earlier in Murph's bedroom and discovers that he can move objects. Knowing she will return as an adult, he encodes data about the black hole into the ticking of his old wristwatch and leaves it on her bookshelf.

  Murph later visits her childhood bedroom and finds the watch. She realizes that the coincidence that led Cooper to NASA was Cooper himself, reaching back from the future. She uses the watch data to complete the work Amelia could not finish. Cooper is ejected from the tesseract and picked up by a spacecraft near Saturn, in his own present. He reunites with Murph, who directed humanity's exodus from a dying Earth and is now nearly 120 years old, older than he is. She does not want him to watch her die, and she suggests he go find Amelia on Edmunds' planet. There, Edmunds has died, robots are building a colony, and Amelia removes her helmet to breathe the alien air.

  That final image of an open helmet belongs to a project that went through more than one director before it reached the screen.

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• 3. Path To The Screen

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  Carl Sagan once set up a blind date between the producer Lynda Obst and the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, and the two went on to work together on the 1997 film Contact. Years later they imagined a story based on Thorne's work, about "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans". The idea caught the attention of Steven Spielberg. In June 2006, Spielberg and Paramount Pictures announced a science fiction film built on an eight-page treatment by Obst and Thorne, with Obst attached as producer. By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan had been hired to write the screenplay.

  Jonathan Nolan spent four years on the script. To learn the science, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology. He felt pessimistic about the end of the Space Shuttle program and about NASA's lack of funding for a human mission to Mars. He also drew on apocalyptic science fiction such as WALL-E (2008) and Avatar (2009). Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly said of the result: "He set the story in a dystopian future ravaged by blight, but populated with hardy folk who refuse to bow to despair."

  In 2009, Spielberg moved his studio, DreamWorks Pictures, from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios, and Paramount needed a new director. Jonathan recommended his brother Christopher, who joined the project in 2012. Spielberg later admitted that Christopher had grown interested after Jonathan told him he would probably direct if Spielberg stepped away. Christopher met Thorne, by then an executive producer, to talk about the use of spacetime in the story. In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Nolan was in talks to direct, and by March he was confirmed. The Hollywood Reporter said his pay would be a salary of $20 million against 20% of the total gross. Nolan said he wanted to encourage the goal of human spaceflight, and he visited NASA and the private space program at SpaceX to research the film.

  Christopher Nolan then went through the many ideas offered by Jonathan and Thorne. He picked those he felt he could get "across to the audience and hopefully not lose them", and he merged them with a script he had worked on for years. One idea he cut was the use of gravitational waves to detect the wormhole. He regretted that choice when LIGO detected gravitational waves a little over a year later. He kept Jonathan's conception of the first hour, set on a resource-depleted Earth inspired by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and revised the space half. After watching the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl, he contacted its director, Ken Burns, and its producer, Dayton Duncan. They gave him permission to use some of their interviews.

  The money required its own negotiation. Warner Bros. wanted a stake in the Paramount project despite the studios' traditional rivalry. In return, Paramount received co-financing rights to the next Friday the 13th film, a stake in a future film based on South Park, and the chance to co-finance an unspecified A-list property. In August 2013, Legendary Pictures finalized a deal to finance about 25% of the production, and it reportedly agreed to sit out Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, due in 2016.

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• 4. Cast And Locations

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  Christopher Nolan wanted an everyman through whom "the audience could experience the story". He found him after watching an early cut of the 2012 film Mud, which he saw as a friend of one of its producers, Aaron Ryder. Nolan then visited McConaughey on the set of the television series True Detective. Hathaway read the script at Nolan's home, and both were cast in early 2013. Chastain was reached while she worked on Miss Julie (2014) in Northern Ireland, and a script was delivered to her there. Irrfan Khan was offered a role but turned it down because of scheduling conflicts. Matt Damon was cast as Dr. Mann in late August 2013.

  The cinematographer was Hoyte van Hoytema, hired because Wally Pfister, Nolan's cinematographer on all of his earlier films, was making his directorial debut with Transcendence (2014). Pfister would later retire from shooting films. Van Hoytema photographed Interstellar on 35 mm film in the Panavision anamorphic format and on IMAX 70 mm. Nolan used more IMAX cameras than on any previous film of his. Van Hoytema retooled one to be hand-held for interior scenes, and another was installed in the nose cone of a Learjet. To keep computer-generated imagery to a minimum, the crew built practical locations, such as the interior of a space shuttle.

  Principal photography was scheduled for four months and began on the 6th of August 2013 in Alberta, Canada. Shooting took place in the towns of Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge, Fort Macleod and Okotoks. For the cornfield scenes, production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of corn that the story would later destroy in a dust storm. In Fort Macleod, giant dust clouds were made on location by using large fans to blow cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air. Filming in the province lasted until the 9th of September 2013 and involved hundreds of extras and 130 crew members, most of them local.

  Iceland stood in for two alien worlds, one covered in ice and the other in water. Nolan had already filmed there for Batman Begins (2005). Locations included the Svínafellsjökull glacier and the town of Klaustur. The crew transported mock spaceships weighing about 10,000 pounds and spent two weeks working there with about 350 people, 130 of them locals. During a water scene, Hathaway came close to hypothermia because her dry suit had not been properly secured. Damon filmed all of his scenes in Iceland.

  After that, the crew shot in Los Angeles for 54 days, using 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. Principal photography ended in December 2013. The production came in at $165 million, which was $10 million less than the three financing partners had allotted.

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• 5. Ships And Effects

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  A clock face is the layout of the Endurance, the crew's mother ship, which consists of 12 capsules laid flat in a circle. Four carry planetary settling equipment, four hold engines, and four house the cockpit, medical labs and habitation. Crowley said the design drew on the International Space Station: "It's really like a submarine in space. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose." The ranger works like the Space Shuttle, entering and leaving planetary atmospheres. The lander carries the settling capsules down to planetary surfaces, and Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter." The human space habitats resemble O'Neill cylinders, a theoretical design proposed by the physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.

  Two robots, CASE and TARS, accompany the crew, and a third, KIPP, appears dismantled. Nolan wanted to avoid human-like machines and chose a quadrilateral body about 4.9 feet tall. He said: "It has a very complicated design philosophy. It's based on mathematics." Bill Irwin voiced and physically controlled both robots, with his image digitally removed. Josh Stewart later replaced Irwin's voice for CASE.

  The effects company DNEG, which had worked on Inception, returned for the film. Visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin said the number of effects was not much greater than in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or Inception. The difference was in the method. His team created the effects first, so that digital projectors could show them behind the actors rather than leaving the actors in front of green screens. Of the 850 effects shots, at a resolution of 5600 by 4000 lines, 150 were made in-camera with projectors and 700 in post-production. A total of 620 were presented in IMAX.

  The spacecraft themselves were physical models. Crowley and New Deal Studios built the ranger, the Endurance and the lander as miniatures, because Nolan felt they gave the ships a tangible presence in space. The crew nicknamed the 3D-printed, hand-sculpted models "maxatures" because of their size. A 1/15th-scale Endurance module spanned over 7.6 meters, and a pyrotechnic model of part of the craft was built at 1/5th scale. The ranger measured 14 meters and the lander over 15 meters. They were large enough for van Hoytema to mount IMAX cameras directly on them, echoing the look of NASA IMAX documentaries. A six-axis gimbal on a motion control system moved the models, which were filmed against background plates of space shot with VistaVision cameras. The miniatures appeared in 150 effects shots.

  One image could not be built by hand at all, and Thorne's equations were needed to produce it.

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• 6. Sound And Music

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  A single page of paper shaped the Interstellar score. Hans Zimmer, who had scored the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception (2010), received no script or plot details from Nolan. Instead he was handed a page telling the story of a father leaving his child to go to work. From that connection he built the early stages of the soundtrack. Zimmer and Nolan later chose the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ of the Temple Church in London as the primary instrument. Zimmer conducted 45 scoring sessions, three times as many as for Inception, and the soundtrack was released on the 17th of November 2014.

  Richard King supervised the sound design, while Gregg Landaker and Gary A. Rizzo handled the audio mixing. Nolan wanted a mix that took full advantage of theater equipment, and he paid close attention to small sounds, such as buttons being pressed by astronaut suit gloves. The studio's website said the film was "mixed to maximize the power of the low-end frequencies in the main channels, as well as in the subwoofer channel." Nolan also meant for some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music. Some theaters posted notices saying the effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.

  Some reviewers would still call the mix clumsy.

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• 7. Science And Black Holes

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  Two guidelines came from Kip Thorne at the start. In his words, "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. At one point Thorne spent two weeks arguing him out of having a character travel faster than light, until Nolan gave up. According to Thorne, the greatest artistic freedom lies in the clouds of ice on one visited planet, which would be structures beyond the strength that ice can support.

  Thorne said he worked on equations for tracing light rays as they travel through a wormhole or around a black hole, so that what viewers see rests on Einstein's general relativity. To show a rotating supermassive black hole, with an ergosphere, he worked with Franklin and a team of 30 at Double Negative. He supplied pages of theoretical equations, and engineers wrote new rendering software to simulate gravitational lensing. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and the work totaled 800 terabytes of data. Thorne described the accretion disk as "anemic and at low temperature", about as hot as the surface of the Sun. It gives off enough light to see but too little gamma radiation and X-rays to threaten nearby astronauts and planets. The simulations gave Thorne new insight and led to three scientific papers.

  Nolan worried that an accurate black hole would not make sense to an audience. When the team added the Doppler effect, the disk became asymmetrically lit, a feature Nolan thought viewers would not understand, so it was left out. He found the final image understandable as long as the camera perspectives stayed consistent. The asymmetric brightness is plainly visible in the first image of a black hole's event horizon, released by the Event Horizon Telescope team in 2019. Futura-Sciences praised the film's correct depiction of the Penrose process, and Space.com judged its wormhole scientifically correct, shown as a sphere with a distorted view of the target galaxy instead of a flat hole.

  Scientists gave mixed verdicts. The astrobiologist David Grinspoon criticized the blight on Earth, noting that even a voracious blight would need millions of years to reduce the atmosphere's oxygen, and that gravity should have pulled the ice clouds down. Neil deGrasse Tyson concluded that interacting with the past is theoretically possible, adding, "we don't really know what's in a black hole, so take it and run with it". Michio Kaku said Interstellar "could set the gold standard for science fiction movies for years to come". Timothy Reyes, a former NASA software engineer, called the accounting of black holes, wormholes and gravity excellent. Jean-Pierre Luminet, creator of the first simulated image of a black hole, praised the warped accretion disk but criticized the wormhole's interior and noted that several effects were left out of the black hole rendering.

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• 8. Release And Reception

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  The teaser trailer debuted on the 13th of December 2013, with clips about space exploration and a voiceover by McConaughey as Cooper. The full trailer arrived on the 5th of May 2014 at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater in Washington, D.C. In the week ending the 19th of May it was the most-viewed film trailer, with over 19.5 million views on YouTube. From the 6th of October to the 19th of November 2014, a virtual reality walkthrough of the Endurance, built with Oculus Rift, visited New York City, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Tie-ins included Thorne's book The Science of Interstellar and a Wired online comic called Absolute Zero, a prequel written by Nolan with Mann as its protagonist.

  Interstellar premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on the 26th of October 2014, and in London at the Odeon Leicester Square on the 29th. In North America it opened first on film stock, in 249 theaters that still supported 70 mm and 35 mm, including at least forty-one 70 mm IMAX theaters. A 70 mm IMAX projector was installed at the TCL Chinese Theatre for the occasion. Digital theaters joined in the wide release on the 7th of November. That made the film an exception to Paramount's goal of ending film-stock releases. Pamela McClintock of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the plan would help preserve an endangered format, supported by Nolan, J. J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow and Paul Thomas Anderson. Theater owners saw it as backward, since nearly every US theater had converted to digital. Its release on over 770 IMAX screens was the largest global IMAX release until Furious 7 reached 810.

  The film earned $188 million in the United States and Canada and $493 million elsewhere, for $681 million worldwide in its first run. Deadline Hollywood calculated a net profit of $47 million. In North America it opened second with $47.5 million, behind Disney's Big Hero 6 at $56.2 million. In China it made $5.4 million on its first day, on the 12th of November, and finished its run there with $122.6 million. South Korea was its biggest market outside North America and China, at $73.4 million. Later releases, including a 10th anniversary run in December 2024, lifted the worldwide total to $774.7 million. It was also reported to be the most pirated film of 2015, with an estimated 46.7 million BitTorrent downloads.

  Critics were divided in degree, not in direction. On Rotten Tomatoes, 73% of 375 reviews were positive, and Metacritic gave it 74 out of 100 from 46 critics. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B+. Scott Foundas of Variety called it "as visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done". Claudia Puig of USA Today praised the spectacle but found the dialogue "dull". Henry Barnes of The Guardian called it "a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama". James Berardinelli named it the best film of 2014. Scott Mendelson of Forbes put it among the year's most disappointing, citing a loss of momentum after the climax and "thin characters". At the 87th Academy Awards, Interstellar earned five nominations and won Best Visual Effects.

  The verdict softened over time. Lindsey Bahr of the Associated Press wrote in 2024 that the film "was received warmly and an unambiguous success, but it also had its detractors", and that its nominations and win were all for crafts. She added that in the decade since, it "has become beloved, a true classic." The author George R. R. Martin called it "the most ambitious and challenging science fiction film since Kubrick's 2001." In 2026, Spielberg said it "was a much better movie in Chris Nolan's hands than it would have been in mine." In 2025 the film ranked number 89 on The New York Times list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, chosen by about 500 directors, actors and others in the film industry. As of May 2026, it ranks number 34 on Letterboxd.

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