Interstellar (film)

Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where Earth is suffering from 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 mankind.

The screenplay had its origins in a script Jonathan developed in 2007 and was originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was an executive producer and scientific consultant on the film, and wrote the tie-in book The Science of Interstellar. It was Lynda Obst's final film as producer before her death. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on 35 mm film in the Panavision anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm. Filming began in late 2013 and took place in Alberta, Klaustur, and Los Angeles. Interstellar uses extensive practical and miniature effects, and the company DNEG created additional digital effects.

Interstellar was released in theaters on November 7, 2014. In the United States, it was first released on film stock, expanding to venues using digital projectors. The film received critical acclaim and grossed $681 million worldwide during its initial theatrical run, making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. Among its various accolades, Interstellar was nominated for five awards at the 87th Academy Awards, winning Best Visual Effects.

In the mid-21st century, humanity faces extinction due to dust storms and widespread crop blights. Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot, works as a farmer and raises his children, Murph and Tom, alongside his father-in-law Donald. Living in a post-truth society, Cooper is reprimanded by Murph's teachers for telling her that the Apollo missions were not fabricated. During a dust storm, the two discover that dust patterns in Murph's room, which she first attributes to a ghost, result from a gravitational anomaly, and translate into geographic coordinates. These lead them to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand, who explains that, 48 years earlier, a wormhole appeared near Saturn, leading to a system in another galaxy with twelve potentially habitable planets located near a black hole named Gargantua. Volunteers of the Lazarus expedition had previously travelled through the wormhole to evaluate the planets, with Miller, Edmunds, and Mann reporting back desirable results.

Cooper is enlisted to pilot the Endurance spacecraft through the wormhole as part of a mission to colonize a habitable planet with 5000 frozen embryos and ensure humanity's survival. Meanwhile, Professor Brand would continue his work on solving a gravity equation whose solution would supposedly enable construction of spacecraft for an exodus from Earth. Cooper accepts against Murph's wishes and promises to return. When she refuses to see him off, he leaves her his wristwatch to compare their relative time when he returns.

The crew, consisting of Cooper, robots TARS and CASE, and scientists Dr. Amelia Brand (Professor Brand's daughter), Romilly, and Doyle, traverse the wormhole after a two-year voyage to Saturn. 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 gigantic tidal wave kills Doyle and waterlogs the lander's engines.

By the time they leave the planet, Cooper and Brand discover that 23 years have elapsed on the Endurance. Having enough fuel left for only one of the other two planets, Cooper and Romilly decide to go to Mann's, as he is still broadcasting, despite Brand's protests. En route, they receive messages from Earth and Cooper watches Tom grow up, get married, and lose his first son. An adult Murph is now a scientist working on the gravity equation with Professor Brand. On his deathbed, Brand confesses that the Endurance crew was never supposed to return, knowing that a complete solution to the equation was not feasible without observations of gravitational singularities from inside a black hole.

On Mann's planet, they awaken him from cryostasis, and he assures them that colonization is possible, despite the extreme environment. During a scouting mission, Mann attempts to kill Cooper and reveals that he falsified his data in the hope of being rescued. He steals Cooper's lander and heads for the Endurance. While a booby trap set by Mann kills Romilly, Brand rescues Cooper with the other lander and they race back to the Endurance. Mann is killed in a failed manual docking operation, severely damaging the Endurance, but Cooper is able to regain control of the station through his own docking maneuver.

With insufficient fuel, Cooper and Brand resort to a slingshot around Gargantua, which costs them 51 years due to time dilation. In the process, Cooper and TARS jettison their landers to lighten the Endurance so that Brand and CASE may reach Edmunds' planet. Falling into Gargantua's event horizon, they eject from their craft and find themselves in a tesseract made up of infinite copies of Murph's bedroom across moments in time. Cooper deduces that the tesseract was constructed by advanced humans in the far future, and realizes that he had always been Murph's "ghost". He uses Morse code to manipulate the second hand of the wristwatch he gave her before he left, giving Murphy the data that TARS collected, which enables her to complete Brand's solution.

The tesseract, its purpose fulfilled, collapses before ejecting Cooper and TARS. Cooper wakes up on a station orbiting Saturn. He reunites with Murph, now elderly and on her deathbed, who tells him to seek out Brand. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to rejoin Brand and CASE, who are setting up the human colony on Edmunds' habitable planet.

Also appearing are Josh Stewart as the voice of CASE; Leah Cairns as Lois, Tom's wife; Liam Dickinson as Coop, Tom's son; David Oyelowo and Collette Wolfe respectively as school principal and teacher Ms. Hanley; Francis X. McCarthy as farmer "Boots"; William Devane as Williams, another NASA member; Elyes Gabel as Cooper Station Administrator; and Jeff Hephner as Cooper Station Doctor.

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. 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. 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. By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay.

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. Christopher Nolan met with Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use of spacetime in the story. In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan was in negotiations to direct Interstellar. Nolan said he wanted to encourage the goal of human spaceflight, and intended to merge his brother's screenplay with his own. By the following March, Nolan was confirmed to direct Interstellar, which would be produced under his label Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions. The Hollywood Reporter said Nolan would earn a salary of $20 million against 20% of the total gross. To research for the film, Nolan visited NASA and the private space program at SpaceX.

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. 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.

Jonathan Nolan worked on the script for four years. To learn the scientific aspects, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology. 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."

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. Among the elements from the original script that Christopher removed was how gravitational waves were used for detecting the wormhole—and then regretted it after LIGO detected gravitational waves just little over a year later. He 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. He revised the rest of the script, where a team travels into space, instead. 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.