NOLAN: This idea of Interstellar, this idea of a film...
...that basically tries to explain or imagine...
...the next step in human evolution, which is that Earth is the nest...
...and at some point we'll have to leave the nest.
I thought that that was an incredibly exciting idea for a movie.
The idea that you could make a film that would fully invest in that next step...
...really hadn't been done before.
That was my attraction to the project.
THOMAS: Clearly from the involvement of Kip Thorne...
...the initial conception of the script that he and Lynda...
...before we were involved, had come up with, this was going to be...
...a great science-fiction movie, but it was gonna have that backbone...
...of real science, real theories, what might actually be possible.
OBST: Kip was one of my very best friends.
I would hang out with him at Caltech...
...and we always talked about my movies and we always talked about his work.
And l asked him what would be the most amazing result...
...to emerge from your work on gravitational waves?
If gravitational waves could discover anything...
...what would you dream that they would discover?
And, of course, it was a wormhole.
THORN E: I think the thing that makes this different...
...is that the science was woven into this film...
...and into the story from the beginning.
And woven in deeply. Real science.
JONATHAN: The mandate from the beginning when I was brought on to the project...
...was to get the science right. To try to take a big idea...
...and ground it as much as possible so you could feel it.
Feel the reality of it, but still get to a place...
...where you had this massive, epic experience.
NOLAN: Jonah had been working on the script at Paramount for several years.
And as with everything either of us works on...
...we use each other as a sounding board so I'd, you know...
...heard a lot about what his aspirations for the project were and what it might be.
JONATHAN: We've always benefited from being able to run our material...
...if it's not something we're working on together, past each other...
...just to get that kind of gut check on, "Where am I going with this thing?"
I would talk to him about the ideas behind the film.
He was very helpful, but I could tell when we'd talk about it, there was a little bit of...
...you know, a little bit with him of, "That sounds like a fun project."
Sounds like a bunch of ideas that he was interested in as well.
NOLAN: And when the project became open, you know...
...I immediately called up the guys at Paramount and asked if I could get involved.
What I was able to do was take the draft of Jonah's script that he got to...
...that had this incredible sort of characters, this great situation...
...and bring some of my own ideas to the table.
Things I'd been working on in the science-fiction realm for many years.
And kind of fuse the things into a project that I thought I could really get my teeth into.
I became interested in the idea of artifacts of higher dimensions.
The idea that you could view human emotion, particular forms of human connectivity...
...as not so much-- They're not dimensions themselves...
...but they're artifacts, potentially, of higher dimensions...
...in which we are spatially, physically, scientifically connected...
...in ways that we can't actually understand.
The influence of Ken Burns' Dust Bowl documentary...
...is profound on the film. And l felt like it would be...
...a very valuable thing to look at in terms of agricultural disaster.
I n terms of, “Okay, well, what really happens...
...when there's a significant breakdown in a farming community."
Over the six hours watching it...
...it struck me that the imagery that he had uncovered...
...what he was presenting there, was so much more extraordinary...
...than anything you see in a science-fiction film.
I really wanted to try and bring the audience's attention to the idea...
...that not only could it happen like this, it actually already has happened even worse.
What I've wanted people involved with the film to slightly take onboard...
...was the power of imagery...
...needing to be a bigger part of this film than it has been on any of our other films.
We've always been interested in startling imagery and what we can do with that...
...but in the case of Interstellar...
...it was going to have to really live or die by those things.
You're really gonna have to look at things in the film to be directly affected by the image...
...not just affected by the characters telling you that something is extraordinary.
Inevitably, if, you know, the fiIm's called Interstellar...
...and you're dealing with the vastness of the universe...
...it's going to have to be the biggest film you've done...
...have to be the most ambitious film you've done.
And that takes a number of different forms.
What I wanted to do in the design of the film...
...and I'd spoke to Nathan Crowley, my designer, about it very early on...
...is that I want to abandon the idea of futurism.
And we all just present things as they are now essentially.
Even though the story is set in the future because what I realized is...
...a huge amount of creative energy...
...goes into the parlor game of trying to figure out...
...what a pair of trousers is gonna look like in the future...
...or a pair of glasses look like in the future.
And you're never gonna get it right.
I wanted to eliminate that thinking entirely from the design process...
...so that we could put our efforts elsewhere...
...and hopefully produce something that was actually a little more timeless.
So I looked to the best examples that I knew.
Koyaanisqatsi was certainly one of them.
The other one we looked at from a more technical point of view...
...is The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman's film...
...which is much, much more technically accomplished...
...than I even realized when I saw it as a kid.
It prompted us to try and do much more in camera...
...to try and create a much more real environment for the actors...
...inside the spaceships, rather than rely on green screens.
It really pushed us in a much more adventurous direction.
We didn't treat I max in as formal a way on this film as we had in some of the other films.
We didn't plot out exactly what sections of the film we'd shoot that way.
We wanted to just see what emerged by carrying the cameras with us...
...and shooting things that naturally suggested themselves.
So for example, when we started on the spaceship interiors...
...it seemed totally unfeasible to shoot on I max...
...because we'd built them in a very real claustrophobic sort of scale.
But then eventually, we found that the limitations of that...
...the difficulty of getting the camera in and around that situation...
...sort of added to the drama of the scene.
Hoyte was determined to show us that we could hand-hold the l max camera.
We tried before, never had been able to do it.
What we'd never tried is what he did, which is...
...just pick the thing u p and not worry about how heavy it was.
How he did it, I've no idea. He's a very strong guy, clearly.
But that freed us up to shoot more of the film in I max.
With science fiction, the danger is that the human element gets lost...
...and so I think incorporating an organic people-based methodology...
...to every aspect of the film whether it was the recording of the music...
...or the miniatures or costumes, all of these things...
...like really trying to always retain a human element...
...I think grounds the film.
We want it to feel relatable, we want it to feel tactile...
...because, ultimately, the film is about human beings...
...what binds us together, what divides us, this kind of things.
But that setting of deep, deep space in between the stars, between galaxies...
...it gives you a very, very fresh approach to be able to look at those issues.