Interstellar
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction filmdirected, co-written, and co-produced byChristopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Casey Affleck, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormholein search of a new home for humanity.
Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolanwrote the screenplay, which had its origins in a script Jonathan developed in 2007. Nolan produced the film with his wife, Emma Thomas, through their production companySyncopy and with Lynda Obst through Lynda Obst Productions. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was an executive producer, acted as scientific consultant, and wrote a tie-in book (The Science of Interstellar). Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures co-financed the film. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytemashot the film on 35 mm in anamorphic formatand IMAX 70 mm. Principal photography commenced in late 2013 in Alberta, Icelandand Los Angeles. The film utilized extensive practical and miniature effects, while the company Double Negative created additionaldigital effects.
Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014, inLos Angeles. In the United States, it was first released on film stock, expanding to venues using digital projectors. The film was successful at the box office, with a worldwide gross of over $675 million, making it thetenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. The film received largely positive reviews, particularly in regard to its science fiction themes, visual effects, musical score and the cast's performances, although some critics found the film to be a disappointment. At the 87th Academy Awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Production Design.
Plot
In the mid-21st century, crop blights and dust storms threaten humanity's survival. Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA pilot, runs a farm with his father-in-law, son Tom, and daughter Murphy. Living in a post-truthsociety (Cooper is reprimanded for telling Murphy that the Apollo missions were not fake), Cooper encourages Murphy to carefully observe and record what she sees. They discover that dust patterns, which Murphy first attributes to a ghost, result from gravityvariations and translate into geographic coordinates. These lead them to a secret NASA facility headed by Cooper's former supervisor, Prof. John Brand.
Brand explains that 48 years earlier awormhole appeared near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with twelve potentially habitable planets located near a black holenamed Gargantua. Volunteers have previously traveled through the wormhole to evaluate the planets, with Miller, Edmunds, and Mann reporting back desirable results. Plan Aattempts to develop a new gravitationalpropulsion theory, allowing a mass exodus from Earth. Plan B is a conventional launch of the Endurance spacecraft with 5,000 frozenembryos to colonize a habitable planet and ensure humanity's survival. Cooper is recruited to pilot the Endurance and accepts against Murphy's wishes. When she refuses to see him off, he leaves her his wristwatch to compare their relative time when he returns.
The crew consists of Cooper, the robots TARS and CASE, and the scientists Dr. Amelia Brand (Prof. Brand's daughter), Romilly, and Doyle. After traversing the wormhole, Cooper, Doyle, and Brand use a lander to investigate Miller's planet, where time is severely dilated. After landing in knee-high water and finding only wreckage from Miller's expedition, a gigantictidal wave kills Doyle and waterlogs the lander's engines. By the time the lander's engines restart, they discover that 23 years have elapsed on the Endurance. Having enough fuel only for one of the other two planets, they vote to go to Mann's, as he is still broadcasting.
En route, they receive messages from Earth. Murphy Cooper is now a scientist working on Plan A. On his deathbed, Prof. Brand revealed to her that Plan B was his only real plan, knowing that Plan A was not feasible without observations of gravitational singularitiesfrom within a black hole.
At Mann's planet, they revive him from cryostasis. He assures them colonization is possible despite an extreme environment. On an excursion, Mann attempts to kill Cooper and reveals that he falsified the data in the hope of being rescued. He steals Cooper's lander and heads for the Endurance. While abooby trap set by Mann kills Romilly, Brand rescues Cooper with the other lander and they race to the Endurance. Mann is killed in a failed manual docking operation, severely damaging the Endurance. Through a difficult docking maneuver, Cooper regains control.
With insufficient fuel, they resort to aslingshot around Gargantua. In the process, Cooper and TARS must jettison their landers to allow Brand and CASE to reach Edmunds' planet. Falling into the event horizon of Gargantua, they eject from their craft and find themselves in a tesseract, possibly constructed by humans in the far future. Cooper can see through the bookcases of Murphy's room on Earth, across time, and weakly interact with its gravity. He realizes that he is now (and was) Murphy's "ghost". He uses Morse code to manipulate the second hand of the wristwatch he gave her before he left, giving Murphy the quantum data that TARS collected, which she needs to solve Brand's gravitational equations.
The tesseract, its purpose completed, collapses and ejects Cooper and TARS. Cooper wakes on a huge station orbiting Saturn. He reunites with his daughter, now an old woman nearing death, who was able to develop the gravitational propulsion theory. Murphy reminds Cooper that Amelia Brand is out there alone. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to rejoin Brand and CASE, who are setting up a human colony on Edmunds' habitable planet.
Cast
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Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain stars as Joseph "Coop" Cooper, Dr. Amelia Brand and Murphy "Murph" Cooper, respectively.
- Matthew McConaughey as Joseph "Coop" Cooper, a widowed father of two and a former NASA pilot forced into farming due to the Earth's lack of food. Cooper is led by an anomaly to NASA's clandestine station. He is chosen to pilot a spacecraft to find a viable planet and save the human race. His motivation, throughout the film, is the love for his daughter. His love for Murph drives his actions, causing him to fight for the success of the mission.
- Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, a scientist driven by love. She directly addresses this in Interstellar by saying, "Maybe we should trust [love], even if we can't understand it." She affirms this while she is attempting to explain her love for Dr. Wolf Edmunds.
- Jessica Chastain as Murphy "Murph" Cooper, Joseph Cooper's daughter is responsible for solving the equation of gravity that consequently saves the human race from extinction. This depiction of Murphy resents that her father left her behind.
- Mackenzie Foy as young Murphy, a curious young girl who is intrigued by the mysterious force referred to as "the ghost." The ghost sequentially knocks over books in her room.
- Ellen Burstyn as elderly Murphy. At this point in her life, she has finally forgiven her father for leaving her behind on Earth to go on the space expedition.
- John Lithgow as Donald, Cooper's father-in-law and Tom and Murphy's grandfather. Donald lives with the Cooper family.
- Michael Caine as Professor John Brand, the figurehead for the Lazarus mission. He is often heard in Interstellar reciting the poem by Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Professor Brand is the father of Dr. Amelia Brand and a firm believer in "Plan B." The plan will save the human race by transporting embryos to a foreign planet without moving the mass of the human population.
- Casey Affleck as Tom Cooper, a farmer, one of many attempting to make up for the world's mass food crisis. He, unlike Murph or Cooper, is motivated to do the little that he can do to save the world in the short run.
- Timothée Chalamet as young Tom, a simple-minded child who, unlike Murphy, attempts to take care of the family after Joseph Cooper leaves Earth.
- Wes Bentley as Dr. Doyle, the geographer aboard the Endurance. He has a very short role in the movie due to his early death on Miller's planet.
- Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry), a large rectangular robot with several moving parts that tends to be humorous and witty although he has a customizable personality.
- Josh Stewart as CASE (voice), a robot with a build similar to TARS. CASE is recognized by his reserved personality.
- Topher Grace as Getty, a NASA doctor, who is brought by Murphy to check on Tom's children. A romantic interest is implied near the end of the film when Getty and Murphy exchange a kiss.
- David Gyasi as Dr. Romilly, the Endurance crew’s most professional scientist. After being left on the ship orbiting Miller’s planet, Romilly aged 23 years while the other team members only endured an hour, but in that time he "learned what [he] could from the black hole, but [he] couldn’t send anything to [Dr. Brand’s] father."
- Matt Damon as Dr. Mann, one of the first scientists to be sent on the Lazarus missions. He is mentioned to be the best of the scientists. Dr. Mann lures the crew of the Endurance spacecraft to his planet with false data in an attempt to save his own life.
- Leah Cairns as Lois Cooper, the wife of Tom Cooper.
- David Oyelowo as Tom and Murphy's school principal.
- Collette Wolfe as Ms. Hanley, Murphy’s school teacher who believes space exploration is fraudulent, telling Cooper that "we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it."
- William Devane as Williams, a NASA administrator who held his position during the launch of the Endurance mission.
- Elyes Gabel as the NASA Administrator
Production
Crew
- Christopher Nolan – director, producer, writer
- Jonathan Nolan – writer
- Emma Thomas – producer
- Lynda Obst – producer
- Hoyte van Hoytema – cinematographer
- Nathan Crowley – production designer
- Mary Zophres – costume designer
- Lee Smith – editor
- Hans Zimmer – music composer
- Paul Franklin – visual effects supervisor
- Kip Thorne – consultant, executive producer
Development and financing
The premise for Interstellar was conceived by film producer Lynda Obst and 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.[4][5] The two conceived of a scenario, based on Thorne's work, about "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans", and attracted filmmaker Steven Spielberg's interest in directing.[6] 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 the film, whichVariety said would "take several years to come together" before Spielberg directed it.[7][8] By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay for the film, titledInterstellar.[9]
Spielberg moved his production studioDreamWorks in 2009, from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios, and Paramount needed a new director for Interstellar. Jonathan Nolan recommended his brother Christopher, who joined the project in 2012.[10] Christopher Nolan met with Kip Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use ofspacetime in the story.[11] In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan was in negotiations to direct Interstellar.[12] Nolan said he wanted to encourage the goal of human spaceflight.[13]He intended to write a screenplay based on his own idea that he would merge with his brother's screenplay.[14] By the following March, Nolan was confirmed to directInterstellar, which would be produced under his label Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions.[15] The Hollywood Reporter said Nolan would earn a salary of $20 millionagainst 20% of what Interstellar grossed; a final total of approximately $121 million.[16]To research for the film, Nolan visited NASA as well as the private space program atSpaceX.[11]
Though Paramount and Warner Bros. are traditionally rival studios, Warner Bros., which released Nolan's Batman films and works with Nolan's Syncopy, sought a stake in Nolan's production of Interstellar for Paramount. Warner Bros. agreed to give Paramount its rights to co-finance the next film in the Friday the 13th horror franchise and to have a stake in a future film based on the TV series South Park. Warner Bros. also agreed to let Paramount co-finance "a to-be-determined A-list Warners property".[17] In August 2013,Legendary Pictures finalized an agreement with Warner Bros. to finance approximately 25 percent of the film's production. Although it failed to renew its eight-year production partnership with Warner Bros., Legendary reportedly agreed to forego financing forBatman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in exchange for the stake in Interstellar.[18]
Writing and casting
The Dust Bowl phenomena of the 1930s, as documented by Ken Burnsin The Dust Bowl, served as inspiration for the blight.
Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan was hired by Spielberg to write a script for Interstellar, and he worked on it for four years.[4] To learn the science, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology while writing the script.[19] Jonathan said he was pessimistic about the Space Shuttle program ending and how NASA lacked financing for a manned mission to Mars. The screenwriter found inspiration in science fiction films withapocalyptic themes, such as WALL-E (2008) and Avatar (2009). Entertainment Weekly has commented: "He set the story in a dystopian future ravaged by blight but populated with hardy folk who refuse to bow to despair."[10]Jonathan's brother, director Christopher Nolan, had worked on other science fiction scripts but decided to take the Interstellarscript and choose amongst the vast array of ideas presented by Jonathan and Kip Thorne, picking what he felt he as a director could get "across to the audience and hopefully not lose them", before he merged it with a script he had been working on for years on his own.[11][20] 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. Christopher instead revised the rest of the script, in which a team travels into space.[4]After watching the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl for inspiration, Christopher contacted director Ken Burns and producer Dayton Duncan, requesting permission to use some of their featured interviews inInterstellar.[21]
Christopher Nolan wanted an actor who could bring to life the vision of Coop being aneveryman character with whom "the audience could experience the story".[22] Nolan said he became interested in casting Matthew McConaughey after seeing him in an early cut of the 2012 film Mud,[22] which he had an opportunity to see since he was friends with one of its producers, Aaron Ryder.[4] Nolan went to visit McConaughey while he was filming for the TV series True Detective.[23]
Anne Hathaway was invited to Nolan's home, where she read the script for Interstellar.[24]Paramount announced in April 2013 that both actors were cast in the film's starring roles.[25]Jessica Chastain was contacted while she was filming Miss Julie in Northern Ireland, and a script was delivered to her.[24] Matt Damon was cast in late August 2013 in a supporting role and filmed his scenes in Iceland.[26]
Filming
Nolan filmed Interstellar with anamorphic 35 mm and IMAX 70 mm photography.[27]Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema was hired for Interstellar, as Wally Pfister, Nolan's cinematographer on all of his past films, was working on his directorial debut,Transcendence.[28] IMAX cameras were used for Interstellar more than for any of Nolan's previous films. To minimize the use of computer-generated imagery, the director had practical locations built, such as the interior of a space shuttle.[22] Van Hoytema retooled an IMAX camera to be handheld for shooting interior scenes.[4] Some of the film's sequences were shot with an IMAX camera installed in the nosecone of a Learjet.[29]
Nolan, who is known for keeping details of his productions secret, strove to ensure secrecy for Interstellar. The Wall Street Journalreported, "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."[30] As one security measure, Interstellar was filmed under the name Flora's Letter,[31] Flora being one of Nolan's four children with producer Emma Thomas.[11]
The SvÃnafellsjökull glacier in Icelandwas used as a filming location forInterstellar, doubling for Mann's planet.
The film's principal photography was scheduled to last for four months.[26] It began on August 6, 2013, in the province ofAlberta.[18] Towns in Alberta where filming took place included Nanton, Longview,Lethbridge, Fort Macleod, and Okotoks. In Okotoks, filming took place at the Seaman Stadium and the Olde Town Plaza.[31] For a cornfield scene, production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres (200 hectares) of corn (50.406661°N 114.204139°W) that would be destroyed in an apocalyptic dust stormscene,[10] intended to be similar to storms experienced during the Dust Bowl in 1930s United States.[11] Additional scenes involving the dust storm and McConaughey's character were also filmed in Fort Macleod, where the giant dust clouds were created on location using large fans to blow cellulose-basedsynthetic dust through the air.[32] Filming in the province lasted until September 9, 2013, and involved hundreds of extras as well as approximately 130 crew members, most of them local.[31]
Filming also took place in Iceland, where Nolan had previously filmed scenes for his 2005 film Batman Begins.[33] The crew transported mock spaceships weighing approximately 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) to the country,[11] which was chosen to represent two extraterrestrial planets: one covered in ice, and the other covered in water.[4] A two-week Iceland shoot was scheduled,[26] and a crew of approximately 350 people, including130 locals, worked on it. Locations included the SvÃnafellsjökull glacier and the town ofKlaustur.[34][35] While filming a water scene in Iceland, actress Anne Hathaway almost suffered hypothermia because the dry suitshe was wearing had not been properly secured.[11]
After the Iceland shoot, the crew moved to Los Angeles to film 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.[36]Filming concluded in December 2013, and Nolan started editing the film for its release in 2014.[37] Production completed with a budget of $165 million, $10 million less than what was allotted by Paramount, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures.[11]
Production design
Interstellar features three spacecraft: the Ranger, the Endurance, and the Lander. The Ranger's function is similar to the Space Shuttle's, being able to enter and exit planetary atmospheres. The Endurance, the crew's mother ship, has a circular structure formed by 12 capsules: four with planetary colonization equipment, four with engines, and four with the permanent functions of cockpit, medical labs and habitation. Production designer Nathan Crowley said theEndurance 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 back-up systems and tangible switches. It's really like a submarine in space. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose." Lastly, the Lander transports the capsules with colonization equipment to planetary surfaces. Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter".[4]
The film also 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 five-foot (1.5 m) quadrilateral design. The director 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." Actor Bill Irwin voiced and physically controlled both robots, but his image was digitally removed from the film and his voicing for CASE was replaced with actor Josh Stewart's voice.[4]
The human space habitats resemble O'Neill cylinders, a theoretical space colony model proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.[38]
Sound design and music
Gregg Landaker and Gary Rizzo were sound engineers for the film, tasked with sound mixing, while sound editor Richard Kingsupervised the process.[39] Christopher Nolan said he sought to mix the film's sound to take maximum advantage of current sound equipment in theaters.[40] Nolan paid close attention to designing the sound mix, for instance focusing on what buttons being pressed with astronaut-suit gloves would sound like.[10] The studio's website said that "The sound on Interstellar has been specially mixed to maximize the power of the low-end frequencies in the main channels as well as in the subwoofer channel."[41] Nolan deliberately intended some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music, causing some theaters to post notices emphasising that this effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.[42]
Composer Hans Zimmer, who scored Nolan's Batman film trilogy and Inception, also scored Interstellar. Zimmer and Nolan strived to develop a unique sound for Interstellar. Zimmer said: "The textures, the music, and the sounds, and the thing we sort of created has sort of seeped into other people's movies a bit, so it's time to reinvent. The endless string (ostinatos) need to go by the wayside, the big drums are probably in the bin."[1] Zimmer also said that Nolan did not provide him a script or any plot details for writing music for the film and instead gave the composer "one page of text" that "had more to do with [Zimmer's] story than the plot of the movie".[2] Nolan has stated that he said to Zimmer: "I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It's going to tell you the fable at the center of the story.""Some dialogue mixed with some ideas I had written for the film" were the words Christopher Nolan used to describe this minimalist creative process.[43]He was simply told to write about "a father and his relationship with his son." Hans connected with these instructions by "writing about what it feels like to be a father."[43] It was through this connection that Hans Zimmer created the early stages of the Interstellar soundtrack. Through a more in-depth analysis of the story’s plot, Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan chose the voice of Interstellar: a 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ.[44] The duo chose this organ for the connotations it gave. "The organ and the cathedrals represent mankind's attempt at portraying the mystical or the metaphysical," Nolan explains. Hans Zimmer elaborates, saying "there is something very human about it because it can only make a sound with air."[43] Zimmer conducted 45 scoring sessions for Interstellar, which was three times more than for Inception. The soundtrack was released on November 18, 2014.[5]
Visual effects
The visual effects company Double Negative, which developed effects for Nolan's 2010 filmInception, worked on Interstellar.[45] Visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin said the number of effects in the film was not much greater than in Nolan's The Dark Knight Risesor Inception, but that for Interstellar, they created the effects first, so that digital projectors could be used to display them behind the actors, rather than having the actors perform in front of green screens.[4]Ultimately 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.[46]
The Ranger, Endurance, and Lander spacecraft were created using miniature effects by production designer 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. Created through a combination of 3D printing and hand sculpting, 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 feet), while a pyrotechnicmodel of a portion 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. The miniatures were large enough for Hoyte 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.[47] New Deal Studio's miniatures were used in 150 special effects shots.[46]
Influences
Director Christopher Nolan said influences onInterstellar included the "key touchstones" of science fiction cinema: Metropolis (1927),2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Blade Runner (1982).[48] About 2001, Nolan said: "The movies you grow up with, the culture you absorb through the decades, become part of your expectations while watching a film. So you can't make any film in a vacuum. We're making a science-fiction film… You can't pretend 2001 doesn't exist when you're making Interstellar." He also said that Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) influencedInterstellar's production design: "Those always stuck in my head as being how you need to approach science-fiction. It has to feel used—as used and as real as the world we live in."[49] Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror(1975) influenced "elemental things in the story to do with wind and dust and water".[50]Both films end with parents and children being reunited with seemingly impossible age differences.
Nolan compared Interstellar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), as a film about human nature.[51] He also sought to emulate films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) andClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He stated: "When you say you're making a family film, it has all these pejorative connotations that it'll be somehow soft. But when I was a kid, these were family films in the best sense, and they were as edgy and incisive and challenging as anything else on the blockbuster spectrum. I wanted to bring that back in some way." He also cited the space drama The Right Stuff (1983) as an example to follow and screened it for the crew before production.[4] To emulate that film, he sought to capture reflection on the Interstellarastronauts' visors. For further inspiration grounded in real-world space travel, the director also invited former astronaut Marsha Ivins to the set.[11] Nolan and his crew studied the IMAX NASA documentaries of filmmakerToni Myers for visual reference of spacefaring missions, and sought to emulate the look of their use of IMAX cameras in the enclosed spaces of a spacecraft interior.[52]
The setting of the farm in the Midwest was inspired by Clark Kent's upbringing in Man of Steel.[20] Outside of films, Nolan drew inspiration from the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.[11]
Scientific accuracy
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Kip Thorne, theoretical physicist, served as scientific consultant and executive producer.
Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. "For the depictions of the wormholes and the black hole," he said, "we discussed how to go about it, and then I 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."[53]
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 movie.[8] At one point, Thorne spent two weeks trying to talk Nolan out of an idea about a character traveling faster than light before Nolan finally gave up.[54] According to Thorne, the element which has the highest degree of artistic freedom is the clouds of ice on one of the planets they visit, which are structures that probably go beyond the material strength that ice would be able to support.[8]
Astrobiologist David Grinspoon criticized the dire "blight" situation on Earth portrayed in early scenes, pointing out that even with a voracious blight it would have taken millions of years to draw down the atmosphere's content of oxygen. He also notes that the ice clouds should have been pulled down by gravity.[55]
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has explored the science behind the ending ofInterstellar. He concludes 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."[56]
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku praised the film for its scientific accuracy and has saidInterstellar "could set the gold standard for science fiction movies for years to come." Likewise, Timothy Reyes, a former NASAsoftware engineer, said, "Thorne's and Nolan's accounting of black holes and wormholes and the use of gravity is excellent."[57]
Physicist Lawrence Krauss said "how did they save the Earth? With a formula? And how was the Earth dying? With some ridiculous mold that was somehow eating up the oxygen in one generation that took two billion years to produce?""[58]
Wormholes and black holes
In creating the wormhole and a supermassiverotating black hole (which possesses anergosphere, as opposed to a non-rotating black hole), Thorne collaborated with visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and a team of 30 people at Double Negative. Thorne would provide pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the engineers, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of the gravitational lensingcaused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totalling to 800 terabytes of data for the movie.[5] The resulting visual effect provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion diskssurrounding black holes, which led to the publication of three scientific papers.[59][60][61]
Christopher 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 movie 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. Nolan didn't like the asymmetry caused by the Doppler effect and thought moviegoers wouldn't understand why it was asymmetrical, so the finished black hole ignored the Doppler effect.[62] Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable, provided that he maintained consistent camera perspectives. "What we found was as long as we didn't change the point of view too much, the camera position, we could get something very understandable".[63]
The portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is considered scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy.[64] The accretion disk of the black hole was described by Thorne as "anemic and at low temperature—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]
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