FILM 1412: INTERSTELLAR
TRIVIA: Early in pre-production,
Dr. Kip Thorne laid down two
guidelines to strictly follow: nothing would violate established physical laws,
and that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the
creative mind of a screenwriter. Christopher
Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of
the making of the movie. That did not prevent clashes, though; at one point
Thorne spent two weeks talking Nolan out of an idea about travelling faster
than light.
To create the wormhole and black
hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated
with VFX supervisor Paul J.
Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of
deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, which then created new CGI
software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer
simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to
render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to 800 terabytes of data.
The resulting VFX provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of
gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to
him writing two scientific papers--one for the astrophysics community and one
for the computer graphics community.
For a cornfield scene, Christopher Nolan sought
to grow 500 acres of corn, which he learned was feasible from his producing of Man of Steel (2013). The
corn was then sold and actually made a profit.
The majority of shots of the robot
TARS were not computer-generated. Rather, TARS was a practical puppet
controlled and voiced on set by Bill Irwin,
who was then digitally erased from the film. Irwin also puppeteered the robot
CASE, but in that instance had his voice dubbed over by Josh Stewart.
The method of space travel in this
film was based on physicist Kip Thorne's
works, which were also the basis for the method of space travel in Carl Sagan's novel
"Contact", and the resulting film adaptation, Contact (1997). Matthew McConaughey stars
in both films.
The giant dust clouds were created
on location using large fans to blow cellulose-based synthetic dust through the
air.
The wormhole explanation using
paper and pen is exactly the same as it appears in Event Horizon (1997).
Cooper's first name is never
revealed throughout the entire film.
Kip Thorne won a scientific
bet against Stephen
Hawking upon the astrophysics theory that underlies Interstellar (2014). As a
consequence, Hawking had to subscribe Penthouse magazine for a year. This
famous bet is depicted in The Theory of
Everything (2014) which was released in the same year as
Interstellar.
Some space sequences were shot with
an IMAX camera installed in the nose cone of a Learjet.
Production designer Nathan Crowley based the
Endurance ship's design on the International Space Station: "It's a real
mishmash of different kinds of technology; you need analog stuff as well as
digital stuff, you need back-up systems and tangible switches. Every inch of
space is used, everything has a purpose. It's really like a submarine in
space".
The apocalyptic Earth setting in
this film is inspired by the Dust Bowl disaster that took place in the United
States during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Many of the characters' names are
found on the books in Murph's room as authors.
The film began as a Paramount
production. When Christopher
Nolan took the director's chair, Warner Bros., which had released
Nolan's recent productions, sought a stake in the project. In exchange for
international distribution rights, Warners gave Paramount the rights to
co-finance future sequels of Friday the
13th (2009) and South Park:
Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999).
The "hyper-sleep"
chambers place the astronauts' bodies in a cold liquid, as seen after they wake
up, when they are covered on blankets or thermal blankets. This is likely a
practical reference to studies that have shown a state of hibernation can be
achieved in the human body by causing hypothermia. This technology has been
used to treat brain damage, and has been proposed as a viable means of keeping
people with severe injuries alive after accidents, while they are transported
to medical facilities, where they can be treated by specialists.
The TARS robot, when standing
upright, strongly resembled a much smaller version of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Cooper tells Murph her name means
"whatever can happen, will happen." Murphy's law actually states
"Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."
The documentary-style interviews of
older survivors shown at the beginning of the film and again on the television
playing in the farmhouse towards the end of the movie are from Ken Burns The Dust Bowl (2012). They
are real survivors, not actors, of that natural disaster.
