The inception of ‘Interstellar’

Filmmaker talks about how he managed to balance an intimate family story with an intergalactic journey.

LOS ANGELES:

After recasting the superhero genre with a dark realism in the Dark Knight trilogy and dissecting dream manipulation in Inception, director Christopher Nolan is tackling the final frontier. Interstellar, out in US theaters on Friday, has taken Nolan into what he described as the furthest exploration of space in film.



The movie balances an intimate father-daughter relationship within the backdrop of an intergalactic journey to save mankind. Nolan, 44, spoke about casting Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey as his leading man, the challenges of constructing Interstellar and the effect of Gravity.

“McConaughey has the right stuff. Cooper (the character), he’s a pilot, and the great thing about the American iconic figure of the pilot, the Chuck Yeager, [is that] there’s a little of the cowboy about him,” said Nolan. He thinks that Matthew embodies that wonderful, earthy sense of an everyman who has great integrity and is extremely competent, somebody you trust to guide you through this story and take you through this journey.

Nolan feels that the biggest challenge in balancing an intimate family story with an intergalactic journey was to create a reality on set so that the actors, who are very much the human element of that  — they’re the intimate, emotional element of that  — so that they can actually connect with the larger scale of the film, they can see it, touch it, taste it.

“So, we tried to build our sets not so much like sets, more like simulators, so the actors could look out of the windows and see the real views of what would be going on there, they could experience the ship shaking and reacting as they flew it,” Nolan explained.



However, the important question remains is why the director choose to set Interstellar in a future that bears close resemblance to the present world? “I want to abandon the idea of futurism in design because... it requires an enormous amount of energy and design that I felt could be better spent just achieving a recognisable sense of reality” said Nolan. As a result he decided to make everything comprehensible and recognisable to today’s audience. “There are a lot of leaps we’re asking the audience to make in terms of engaging with a story which takes them places they haven’t been before, so I think rooting the basic design of the film in the things that people know now is helpful”.

In the Sci–fi film, the Earth faces a severe environmental disaster brought on by the grounds drying up of the planet but this was not a conscious effort to address the problem of climate change. “We live in the same world, my brother and I. We work on the script, we live in the same world as everyone else so we’re sort of affected by the same things, worried about the same things, but we try not to be didactic in the writing, we try not to give any particular message or sense of things”.

Nolan is one of the very few people who haven’t watched Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity as yet because it came out while he was in the middle of making his own science fiction film. “So I apologised to Alfonso and said ‘I’m going to catch up with it when I’m done, but I don’t want to be confused by it’. But I think his success with that film; it really helps people working in the science fiction genre, because it just opens people’s eyes to its potential”.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 9^th, 2014.

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