Entertainment thread by @ATRightMovies

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INTERSTELLAR was released 11 years ago today. The 9thfeature film of director Christopher Nolan, and one of the biggest science fiction epics of the 21st century, the story of how it was made will have you wondering at our place in the stars…

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Having worked together in 1997 on science fiction drama Contact, producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne came up with an idea for a movie about “the most exotic events in the universe” and wrote a treatment for a story called Interstellar.

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In 2006, the 8-page treatment drew the attention of Steven Spielberg and he came on board to direct, with Paramount Pictures set to distribute. In 2007, British screenwriter Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay.

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However, when Spielberg moved his studio, DreamWorks Animation, from Paramount to Disney, it resulted in him leaving Interstellar too. With the studio looking for a new director, Jonathan Nolan made a recommendation – his brother, Christopher.

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Enthused by a meeting with Kip Thorne, Nolan signed on to direct, on condition that he combine his brother’s script with an idea of his own. When Nolan’s regular studio collaborators, Warner Bros, heard about it, they struck a deal to co-fund with Paramount.

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The antagonist is former NASA pilot (now crop farmer) Joseph ‘Coop’ Cooper, sent to another galaxy to find a new Earth. Having just seen Matthew McConaughey in Mud, Nolan thought him perfect as “an everyday man who can experience these extraordinary events.”

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McConaughey met Nolan at the director’s offices and later said they talked for 3 hours about family and life, but there was no mention of the film. Nolan said he already knew McConaughey could play the part, he just wanted to make sure they would get along.

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Once he was cast, McConaughey spent time with pilots and farmers to prepare for the role, and Nolan would say “I've never worked with an actor so relentless in his pursuit of truth in everything he does.”

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A member of Coop’s crew is Dr Amelia Brand. Having worked with Anne Hathaway on The Dark Knight Rises (where she played Selina Kyle/Catwoman), Nolan invited her to his home. She read the script in private, and signed up immediately.

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Hathaway had a tough time through production. Filming the ice planet scenes in Iceland, her spacesuit didn’t get zipped up properly, and she got hypothermia. She said that she told Nolan she was “really cold” and he wrapped up more quickly.

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Another major character is Coop’s daughter, Murph, a NASA scientist. Nolan wanted Jessica Chastain in the role and sent a script to the set of Miss Julie, which she was filming. She said the script was watermarked withy her name and she had to return it after reading.

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Ellen Burstyn and Mackenzie Foy also played Murph at different stages of her life, and Casey Affleck and Timothée Chalamet (relatively unknown at the time) came on board as Coop’s son, Tom.

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Nolan also approached Indian actor Irrfan Khan about playing a role. The specific part was never revealed, but Khan turned the role down, reportedly due to the shooting schedule. Khan said turning Nolan down was "one of the most difficult decisions" of his career.

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When Jonathan Nolan signed on as writer for Spielberg’s project, he worked on it for 4 years. He studied spacetime and relativity at the California Institute of Technology and said he drew inspiration from Pixar’s WALL-E and its post-apocalyptic future Earth.

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That first script was very different: Chinese astronauts set out 30 years before Coop’s mission which, due to time dilation, becomes thousands of years. The Chinese astronauts were long dead but survived by their robots, who try to kill Coop’s crew.

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A theme of the film revolves around Time – reflected in the space station being designed to resemble a clock face. The father-daughter relationship is also key, leading to Nolan giving the project the code title Flora’s Letter (Nolan’s daughter is called Flora).

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Kip Thorne was involved throughout the project, serving as Nolan’s technical consultant. Thorne had two rules: nothing could violate known laws of physics, and that any speculations would be based on science. Nolan accepted his terms.

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The wormhole method of space travel seen in Interstellar was based on Thorne’s work, though he did spend 2 weeks talking Nolan out of portraying faster-than-light travel. And the blackboard equations seen were real equations provided by Thorne.

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There are some references to the early aviation pioneers. A biography of Charles Lindbergh (first to fly across the Atlantic) is seen on Murph’s bookshelf, and Dr Brand is very possibly named after Amelia Earhart, who disappeared on a round-the-world attempt.

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The score was written by Nolan’s regular collaborator Hans Zimmer. To brief the composer, Nolan didn’t give Zimmer a script, but rather a one-page piece of text that talked about a father and his child and didn’t go into much detail on the plot.

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Much of Zimmer’s score was written to a tempo of 60bps, so matching the speed of time. And when he recorded, Zimmer played on a classic Harrison & Harrison organ from 1926, which was loaned from the 12th-century Temple Church in London.

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Nolan’s regular cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was making his debut feature at the time of Interstellar so Hoyte Van Hoytema was hired as Director of Photography. Paramount had began a move to shooting digitally, but Nolan insisted on using 35mm and IMAX 70mm film.

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Many of the IMAX lenses used hadn’t been seen and were prototypes, leading to modifications being made on the fly. And many of the space-set scenes were filmed with an IMAX camera placed in the nose of a Learjet.

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To make the environments as realistic as possible for his actors, Nolan had CGI effects of spatial events created in advance and then projected onto screens placed on the set, so the actors could see the final result.

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The Ranger, Endurance, and Lander ships were created by effects studio New Deal Studios as both miniatures and life-size models. The production designer, Nathan Crowley, based the Endurance on the International Space Station.

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In designing the modern buildings, inspiration was taken from modernist German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. And the replica of Coop’s home we see in the climax was based on the curvature of a Möbius strip.

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The costume designer, Mary Zophres, was tasked with designing the spacesuits. When created, the suits had functional oxygen-supplying units, cooling water-carrying tubes (like real spacesuits) and weighed 35lbs.

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Ahead of filming, Nolan held screenings for his crew to portray the kind of visual style he was going for. The screenings included Toni Myers’ IMAX documentaries about NASA and historical drama The Right Stuff.

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The film was shot at a variety of locations around the world. The Eldhraun lava field, Mafabot, and the glacier Svínafellsjökull in the southern region of Iceland were all visited, along with Alberta in Canada.

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The Earth we see in the film is suffering a global crop blight. The inspiration for this was the Dust Bowl natural disaster – a period of drought and storms - that occurred in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada in the 1930s.

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The film opens with documentary-style interviews of older people talking about the events that led to the current situation on Earth. Some of these are actual survivors of the real Dust Bowl disaster, taken from Ken Burns’ documentary of that name.

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The giant dust clouds weren’t CGI, they were created on location. Huge fans were used to blow synthetic dust through the air, and Jessica Chastain said the appearance of the storms was achieved by with biodegradable cardboard material.

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To create the huge cornfields we see on Coop’s farm, Nolan had the production grow a 500 acre corn field. He’d learned this was possible when he worked as producer on Man Of Steel. Reportedly, the produced corn was sold and turned a profit.

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The astronauts hyper-sleep chambers, in which they lie in cold liquid, have a basis in science. Studies have shown that manually-induced hypothermia can lead to a state of hibernation in humans.

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The robot is named Technically Advanced Robotic System – or TARS. Nolan said the idea of a robotic sidekick with a personality came from Douglas Adams’ classic sci fi satire The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy and Marvin, it’s most prominent robot.

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TARS was created as a life-size animatronic that weighted 200lbs. He was voiced and operated by actor and choreographer Bill Irwin, with stuntman Mark Fichera being involved in more complex and dangerous moments.

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Irwin also operated the robot CASE, though the voice was provided by American actor Josh Stewart. And the third robot – KIPP – is named after Kip Thorne.

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There are references to characters travelling via a ‘tesseract’. This term existed before the film, first appearing in Charles Howard Hinton’s 1888 book A New Era of Thought. It was defined as a structure that extends a cube into four dimensions.

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Effects studio Double Negative were responsible for creating the wormhole and black hole (Gargantua). They worked with Kip Thorne, who gave them hundreds of theoretical equations. After the film, Thorne wrote two scientific papers based on his work with Double Negative.

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Double Negative created new CGI software for the film, specifically to produce the wormhole and black hole. Their work was so accurate and detailed that some frames took 100 hours to render, and the CGI program reached 800TB of data.

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The wormhole was placed near Saturn is seen as a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick had planned to set part of his movie there but due to effects limitations, Saturn’s rings couldn’t be recreated and Kubrick switched to Jupiter.

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Gargantua’s massive gravity causes a time dilation effect for the characters. This is shown on Miller’s planet where we hear a tick sound in the score approx. every 1.5 seconds. Each tick represents 1 day passing back on Earth.

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Filming in Iceland, gusts of wind could reach speeds up to 100mph, forcing the crew to take refuge at their hotels on occasion. To avoid delays, Nolan ended up shooting some insert shots in the hotel car park.

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Matt Damon plays Dr Mann, and Nolan wanted to keep his appearance a surprise for audiences. As such, Damon wasn’t included in any marketing for the film and did not attend any premieres.

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The ice planet Mann is marooned on contains one of the few scientific fictions in the film. Kip Thorne said the ice clouds we see on the planet are structures that ice wouldn’t be able to support in real life.

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Murph’s bookshelf was stacked intentionally. We see books about black holes that Nolan read during his research. There is also a copy of The Stand – Stephen King’s classic novel about an apocalyptic event almost wiping out humanity.

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Reportedly, the first person offered the part of older Murph was Jessica Lange, McConaughey’s recommendation, but she couldn’t do it. We also see McConaughey’s children – Levi and Vida – standing at Murph’s bedside.

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On the film being released, there were some criticisms about the sound mixing of the film. Nolan called the mix "adventurous and creative", explaining that he often used the dialogue in the movie as a sound effect, and placed it under other effects in the mix.

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On its release, Interstellar was a big hit. From a budget of $165m, it grossed $730.8m at the box office and was nominated for 5 Oscars, winning one for Best Visual Effects.

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Finally… just before KIPP detonates on the ice planet, we hear him say “Please don’t make me!” This suggests at a backstory between the pair which was all explained when Nolan wrote a comic called Absolute Zero about Mann’s time on the planet.

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If you liked our making of story of INTERSTELLAR, please share the opening post.

All The Right Movies@ATRightMovies

INTERSTELLAR was released 11 years ago today. The 9thfeature film of director Christopher Nolan, and one of the biggest science fiction epics of the 21st century, the story of how it was made will have you wondering at our place in the stars…

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INTERSTELLAR was released 11 years ago today. The 9thfeature film...

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