How a Blind Date Birthed Interstellar

A Blind Date With Science

The premise of Interstellar began well before any cameras rolled, with producer Lynda Obst and physicist Kip Thorne conceiving the idea after being set up on a blind date by Carl Sagan, who had collaborated with them on 'Contact'. The project first landed with Steven Spielberg, but he stepped away and Christopher Nolan took over in 2012 after Jonathan Nolan persuaded his brother to step in by suggesting he would probably direct it if Spielberg left. Nolan's commitment came with a notable deal, a $20 million salary plus 20% of the film's total gross as director.

Four Years of Relativity

Jonathan Nolan spent four years working on the screenplay and studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology to understand the scientific concepts at its core. Christopher Nolan later removed gravitational waves as a plot device for detecting the wormhole from Jonathan's script, a choice he then regretted after LIGO detected gravitational waves just over a year later. For texture on Earth, Ken Burns granted Christopher Nolan permission to use featured interviews from his 2012 documentary 'The Dust Bowl' in 'Interstellar' after Nolan contacted him for inspiration.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordina — Event Horizon Telescope, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Casting Cooper and Building Endurance

Matthew McConaughey was cast after Christopher Nolan saw an early cut of 'Mud' and later visited him on the set of 'True Detective'. The film's central ship reflected a very practical obsession with form. The Endurance spacecraft was designed as a circular structure of 12 capsules laid flat to mimic a clock face, inspired by the International Space Station's modular design.

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas. — George Everett Marsh Jr., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Maxatures and Pixels

The spacecraft miniatures, nicknamed 'maxatures' by the crew for their massive size, included a 1/15th-scale Endurance spanning over 7.6 meters and hand-sculpted Ranger and Lander models over 14 and 15 meters respectively. Visual effects company DNEG created 850 effects shots at 5600 × 4000 resolution, with 150 created in-camera using digital projectors instead of relying on green screen compositing. It is a film built from a dinner date, a physics seminar, and a lot of very large models.

This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. Earth is about five degrees above the horizon in the photo. The unnamed — Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.