Interstellar: love & rockets

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This article was published 06/11/2014 (3962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Los ANGELES — While Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar was shooting everywhere from Alberta to Iceland in 2013, it was code-named Flora’s Letter. That was an indication that, as much as humanly possible, this would be a project wrapped in secrecy.

Even on the eve of its release, some secrets will remain guarded with regards to everything from plot twists to casting choices. (No professional media person wants to be a spoiler.)

What should be evident, however, is that Interstellar aspires to grand, ambitious, visually dazzling and yes, trippy science fiction of a calibre not seen since Stanley Kubrick unveiled 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

And yet the movie must be viewed as light years away from Kubrick’s visionary odyssey. Just as Nolan reinvented the comic-book genre with his Dark Knight trilogy, he was intent on creating something unique in the realm of science fiction: a film with 2001’s conceptual brilliance, but with a beating human heart.

Thus, Interstellar is a very human drama about a crack pilot (Matthew McConaughey) enlisted on a space mission in a post-apocalyptic America to find new world to inhabit in the face of Earth’s imminent demise, even if that mission will take him from his two young children.

At a press conference for the film — alongside his screenwriter brother Jonathan, McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain — Nolan tells an instructive story to illustrate his approach with regards to his frequent musical collaborator Hans Zimmer. When the director signed on to make the film from Jonathan’s original screenplay, he arranged a kind of consultation with the prolific film composer.

“I didn’t want Hans to know what the genre (of the film) was,” says Nolan. “So I wrote out a page of what I considered to be the heart of the story: the relationships, the idea of a father having to leave his children.

“I gave it to Hans and said: ‘Work on that for a day and give me what you’ve got and that will be the seed the score will grow from.’

“And indeed, the finished score came from that particular creative act. That’s an illustration of the approach we tried to take in terms of keeping this about the humanity, and using the exploration of the universe as really a lens through which to view ourselves as human beings.”

 

Other non-spoiler things you should know about Interstellar:

 

For a movie that dares to portray temporal relativity, wormholes and fifth-dimensional reality in three-dimensional space, the human dimension was foremost on the filmmakers’ minds:

“When I first looked at Jonathan’s draft on Interstellar, it was very clear that at the heart of the story was this great set of characters, this great family relationship,” Nolan says. “We found that, the more you explored the cosmic scale of things, the further out in the universe you went, the more the focus came down to who we are as people and the connections between us.”

 

While cash-strapped governments have largely put the kibosh on costly space travel, it is, more than ever, a worthy pursuit, at least to the filmmakers:

“Space exploration to me has always represented the most hopeful and optimistic endeavour that mankind has ever really engaged with,” Nolan says, recalling witnessing the space shuttle’s flight into Los Angeles on the back of a 747 among a throng of space travel enthusiasts in Griffith Park.

“It was a very moving moment, actually. I had a little melancholy because that sense of that great collective endeavour is something that feels like we’re in need of again. I feel very strongly that we’re at a point where we need to start looking out again and exploring our place in the universe more.”

That feeling was in fact the inspiration for Jonathan Nolan to write the first draft of Interstellar’s screenplay in 2006.

“I was lucky enough to be growing up in this country and in this moment in time where it feels like every day is Christmas, where there’s some remarkable technology or some remarkable thing coming every day,” Jonathan says, noting that, in spite of all those technological advances, space travel had, in fact, stagnated.

“I realized that all those Americans who landed on the moon did so (before I was born),” Jonathan says. “You get to a certain age and you realize the speeches about going back to the moon are just speeches. There’s no money in there. We’re not going back.

“And in that moment, the sadness of that was to imagine that, as a species, we might have peaked,” he says. “If you charted our evolution as a species in terms of altitude, we may have peaked in 1973. And that was kind of a sad realization.

“When you grow up, we were promised jet packs and we got Instagram,” he says. “Kind of a bum deal, I think.

“So I was rooted in the optimism of: what’s the next moment in which we’ll journey once again?”

“I remember when I was a kid, my first real confrontation with space travel was when the Challenger exploded,” says actress Jessica Chastain, referring to the 1986 shuttle launch disaster that famously claimed the life of astronaut-teacher Christa McAuliffe. “I remember how traumatic that was for me, because I was watching on the news and all of the children in her class were watching it.

“So I never imagined that it was something I wanted to do,” she says. “But I think we as human beings need to conquer our fears and reach beyond our grasps, and I think it’s very important that we don’t become complacent and stagnant.”

Spacesuit costumes weighing 40 pounds were at least lighter than the 100-pound outfits real astronauts wear.

“They did a lot of work to make it as light as possible,” McConaughey says. “It was easy to manoeuvre in. Could you break out into a sprint? No.”

“The first time I put it on, I made up my mind that it was my favourite costume that I’ve ever worn,” says Anne Hathaway, who plays a fellow astronaut in McConaughey’s crew, allowing that Nolan’s costuming her as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises) was “pretty spectacular.”

“But this one was the closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling like a kid at Halloween, if you can stretch Halloween out for several months. And I loved that feeling,” she says.

“Forty pounds is a lot for me, so it also helped that I made up my mind that I loved it. Because it was the only way forward.”

Interstellar opens at Polo Park Imax Nov. 6 and opens at Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park and Towne cinemas on Nov. 7.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca