Released: November 5, 2014

Directed By: Christopher Nolan

Screenplay By:  Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine and a bunch of other actors.

Plot: When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

Taglines:   Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.

How did this movie do?
Budget: $165 Million
Box Office: $774 Million

• At the 87th Academy Awards, Interstellar received nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing, and won Best Visual Effects.

• This movie parodies the story that the moon landings were faked by the government. It’s used in the movie as an attempt to quell future generations’ enthusiasm for space travel. Amazingly, real-life conspiracy theorists claim that Stanley Kubrick directed the television footage of the landings, using leftover props from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is one of the inspirations for this movie.
  
  
• To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects 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 one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects 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.
  
  
• 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. Writer, Producer, and Director 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.
  
  
• According to Dr. Kip Thorne, the largest degree of creative license in this movie are the clouds of the ice planet, which are structures that probably go beyond the material strength which ice would be able to support.
  
  
• Composer Hans Zimmer was instructed by Christopher Nolan to make a unique score: “it’s time to reinvent. The endless string ostinatos need to go by the wayside, the big drums are probably in the bin.” Nolan did not provide Zimmer 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.”
  
  
• The method of space travel in this movie was based on physicist Dr. Kip Thorne’s works, which were also the basis for the method of space travel in Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact”, and the resulting movie adaptation, Contact (1997). Matthew McConaughey starred in both movies.
  
  
• Steven Spielberg, who was attached to direct this movie in 2006, and hired Jonathan Nolan to write the screenplay, chose other projects instead. In 2012, after Spielberg’s departure, Jonathan Nolan suggested the project to his brother Christopher Nolan.
  
  
• According to Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, it would take an infinite amount of time to cross the threshold of a black hole’s event horizon, as seen by a distant observer. The person crossing the threshold, however, would notice no change in the flow of time.
  
  
• Anne Hathaway suffered from hypothermia while filming in Iceland, due to the fact that her astronaut suit was open while filming scenes in the icy water.
  
  
• Like Inception (2010) and the last two “Dark Knight” movies, Writer, Producer, and Director Christopher Nolan has focused on as many real environments as possible. “We have spatial interiors. We built closed sets and shot it like a documentary, like the actors were really there”, he said. Nolan had the visual effects created in advance, and projected onto screens placed outside the spacecraft set, so when the actors and actresses looked out the windows of their vessel they would be able to see and react to a real environment, and not a green screen. Technically, Nolan said he shot with an IMAX camera on this movie more than on any of his previous movies. He also wanted to give greater enhancement to the audio experience this time around. He stated that he has “very ambitious sound mix plans. I want to give audiences an incredible immersive experience. The technical aspects are going to be more important than any film I’ve made before.”
  
  
• The Wormhole was placed near Saturn as a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), because Stanley Kubrick originally planned for part of that movie to take place at Saturn, which was also the story line of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel. Unfortunately, as visual effects technology wasn’t able to make Saturn’s rings at that time, he changed it to Jupiter.
  
  
• Kip Thorne won a scientific bet against Stephen Hawking upon the astrophysics theory that underlies this movie. As a consequence, Hawking had to subscribe to Penthouse Magazine for a year. This famous bet was depicted in The Theory of Everything (2014).
  
  
• The screenplay is based on the works of theoretical physicist Dr. Kip Thorne. He described the story as “based on warped space-time, the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans.”
  
  
• Several tracks of Hans Zimmer’s original score were recorded at a tempo of a beat per second (sixty beats per minute), precisely matching the passage of time, a recurring theme of the movie. These key scenes include “Imperfect Lock”, “No Time For Caution” (the docking scene), and varying portions of “Stay”, “Mountains” (the water planet), and “Detach”.
  
  
• The “hyper-sleep” chambers place the astronauts’ bodies in a cold liquid, as seen after they wake up, when they are covered in 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 Ranger, Endurance, and Lander spacecrafts were created using miniature effects and full-size models, by effects company New Deal Studios, as Christopher Nolan felt they were better than computer generated effects, to give the ships a tangible presence in space.
  
  
• The robot personalities were inspired by Douglas Adams’ universe (“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”), where the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation created the Genuine People Personalities (“GPP”), which imbue their robots with intelligence and emotion. The most recognized example in Adams’ universe is Marvin, a depressed android.
  
  
• A copy of Stephen King’s novel “The Stand” is visible among Murph’s books. King’s book is about the near extinction of humanity and the survivors’ struggle to relocate and settle down.
  
  
• The shape of the space station, is in reference to a clock face, with time being a major theme in the movie.
  
  
• On April 10, 2019 the first photo of a black hole was made public that looked very similar to the black hole shown in this movie.
  
  
• Besides Saturn’s connection to crops, he was also known as Kronos, the god of time (“chronos”) and cycles (thus the eponymous chronology, chronicle, et cetera.). Since time is a key theme in the movie, the appearance of the wormhole next to the planet Saturn is highly significant.
  
  
• In working together, Christopher Nolan and Matthew McConaughey said each was different from their perceptions of one another. McConaughey expected Nolan to be a perfectionist, but learned he is collaborative, has a dry sense of humor, and that “he actually likes the imperfections.” Meanwhile, Nolan believed McConaughey would be loose and laid-back, but found him to be intense and serious about his work on this film.
  
  
• With a running time of two hours, forty-seven minutes, and seven seconds, it is the longest IMAX movie ever released as of 2014.
  
  
• The visual effects that portray the wormhole with stars stretching out on its horizon is known in astrophysics as “Gravitational Lensing”. That is, in fact, how astronomers have identified black holes (an intense gravitational field bending space so much, that light coming from stars behind it is stretched out around the sphere of the black hole’s “event horizon”). Considering the high-degree of scientific accuracy of this movie, it’s not inconceivable that a wormhole would look much in real-life, as it is portrayed on this movie.
  
  
• Writer, Producer, and Director Christopher Nolan earned twenty million dollars and twenty percent of the gross for this movie.
  
  
• The name of the black hole is “Gargantua”, who was also a giant with an incredible appetite, very difficult to satisfy. This character was created by Francois Rabelais in his “Gargantua et Pantagruel” novels.
  
  
• If seven years equals one hour on the water planet, a day expires every one and a half seconds.
  
  
• The acronym T.A.R.S. actually stands for “technically artificial robotic system”.
  
  
• Nolan deliberately intended some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music, causing some theaters to post notices emphasizing that this effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.
  
  
• The ship they take through the wormhole is named “The Endurance”, which was also the name of Ernest Shackleton’s ship that he took on his expedition to be the first to travel the full circumference of Antarctica. That expedition was stymied when the ship was trapped in the ice sheets that surrounded Antarctica. Though the mission was considered a failure, everyone on the ship made it back alive. Perhaps this name alludes to the hope of saving all of the lives of everyone back on Earth.
  
  
• Cooper asks TARS if he is honest – to which TARS replies he is programmed for 90 percent honesty. A key theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the conflict Hal 9000, the ship’s computer has in being instructed to lie to Bowman and Poole. This conflict with his basic programming – to accurately process information causes Hal to become psychotic and kill the crew, with the exception of Bowman. TARS having the programmed ability to lie would overcome this problem when he interacts with humans.
  
  
• Among the books visible in Professor Brand’s office is a copy of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, who came up with the theory of relativity, which is an important element of the film’s plot.
  
  
• This was the first movie directed by Christopher Nolan since The Prestige (2006) to feature an opening title card.
  
  
• Although released in 2014, this was the most pirated movie of 2015. As a result, Russian YouTube “mockbuster” Interstelar (2014) reached hundreds of thousands of views mistaken for the pirated copy of this movie, before it was subsequently deleted. It was later reinstated on another channel to coincide with the release of a sequel, Interstelar 2: Operation Terra 2040 (2016).
  
  
• Cooper, Amelia, and Miller, all share names with famous missing person cases of individuals in flight who were never found (D.B. Cooper, Amelia Earhart, and Glenn Miller).
  
  
• In order to participate as a co-financier on this film, Warner Bros. relinquished its share of the film rights to the “Friday the 13th” film series to Paramount Pictures, who had the other controlling interest to the series. Both studios have previously released films from the franchise.
  
  
• The spacecraft is not launched until forty-three minutes into the movie.