Courtney Howard // Film Critic
***This piece was originally published on November 2014 on VeryAware.com.***
Co-writer/ director Christopher Nolan’s awe-inducing, mind-bending film, INTERSTELLAR, takes audiences on a journey of a lifetime. In the sci-fi tinged dramatic adventure, former test pilot turned farmer and single father Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is propositioned by NASA to go on an epic quest to save Earth. Unable to refuse this offer, despite his headstrong daughter Murph’s (Mackenzie Foy) protests, he embarks on an intergalactic space mission to save humanity. Bursting with emotion, INTERSTELLAR is massive in scale and ambition and should be experienced on the biggest screen possible.
Since we learned quite a bit at the film’s recent press day in Los Angeles, we wanted to share with you a few of the film’s best behind-the-scenes details straight from the stars (McConaughey and Anne Hathaway) and the filmmakers (Christopher Nolan, co-writer Jonathan Nolan and producer Emma Thomas) themselves.
5. INTERSTELLAR doubles as an insular family drama. Christopher Nolan says, “When I first looked at Jonah’s draft, it was very clear that at the heart of this story there was this great set of characters – this great family relationship. We found that the more you explored the cosmic scale of things, the more focus came down to who we are as people and what are the connections between us.” Jonathan Nolan says, “The first step in writing this was trying to understand the science. First step was trying to understand relativity. If you wanna explore these bigger questions, you have to move in proportion with the opposite direction in terms of making sure it’s grounded in human experience.” Thomas states, “I love that this deals with space travel, but at the same time is this very intimate story and is relatable.”
4. INTERSTELLAR began as a project for Steven Spielberg and then Christopher Nolan took a crack at it. Christopher Nolan states, “The inception was talking to Jonah about the script he was working on. He was working on it for Steven Spielberg at the time, but we always bounce ideas off each other. It just sounded incredibly exciting. What it was that got me was it’s really about an inevitability. We’re going to leave this planet at some point further than we have; we’re going to go to Mars. There’s an inevitability to human evolution – this being the next step. The idea with this story, you could view it as the nest, and one day we leave the nest. That, to me, seemed like a massive thing that hadn’t been addressed in movies.” Thomas says, “The thing I love that Jonah’s script had and that Chris continued with was there’s a real hope to it – a real sense of what we have as humanity. The resourcefulness, the sense of adventure and resilience.”
3. Christopher Nolan researched with NASA – particularly with their relationship with IMAX. He states, “One of our greatest resources was IMAX and their relationship with NASA. Over the last 30 years, the same cameras we used to shoot the film, they’ve gone into space. They have this incredible library of footage. One of the first things I did was I got the DP, the designer, the visual effects supervisor, we rented the IMAX at CityWalk and projected these films all in one day – watched as many as we could to immerse ourselves in the details of it.”
2. Matthew McConaughey’s spectacular crying scene flowed fluidly out of him. The crew of the Endurance are able to receive messages from loved ones back on Earth. One message in particular sets Cooper off on a crying jag sure to also have audiences in tears. The affable actor states, “It’s one of those scenes that I read and put a proverbial tack in it – and go, ‘that better work.’ It was all about relaxing. I was relaxed to receive. On purpose, I didn’t see any of the footage beforehand and I didn’t want to. It can be easy for an actor to think, ‘I really have to do a lot.’ And to then no, you’re not committed…bound to do anything.” Christopher Nolan interjects, “It’s worth pointing out that he wanted to come to it fresh – not knowing what he was going to see and the first take would be the one to use. The technical demands on the crew were pretty significant. We did do subsequent takes but what’s in the film is the first take – the initial first reaction. You get to drop the theatricality and tap something very raw, human, personal, very intimate. There were a lot of manly man tears in dailies.”
1. Regular NASA spacesuits were streamlined for the actors. McConaughey and Hathaway spend most of their screen time in spacesuits and having one of their tools of the trade – their body – slightly obscured by a helmet. But neither thought of it as a hindrance. McConaughey states, “The suit was only 40 pounds…” Hathaway playfully retorts, “Only 40 pounds?!” McConaughey continues, “I think real spacesuits are closer to 100 and so they did a lot of work making it as light as possible so it would be easy to maneuver. Could you break out into a sprint? No. Once you had the suit on, as far as what you could express was from the neck up and sometimes through the mask. For me, it was part of the story that made sense. It was physically more challenging in Iceland in a spacesuit on a glacier with the elements, absolutely. Some suits had holes…” Hathaway concurs, “I don’t think it hindered. The first time I put it on, I made up my mind it was my favorite costume I’d ever worn. This one was the closest I’ve felt to feeling like a kid on Halloween if you could stretch Halloween out for several months. I loved that feeling. 40 pounds is a lot for me, so it helped I had to make up my mind to love it.”
INTERSTELLAR opens on November 7.
