Interstellar is a visual masterpiece, but the most spectacular aspect of the movie is
that those jaw dropping shots of black holes and wormholes are the most realistic depictions
of these phenomena man has ever created.
Thanks to a $200 million budget only a proven blockbuster filmmaker can command, Director
Christopher Nolan’s team had the resources to create impeccably detailed computer generated
simulations of space-time events that had previously only existed in highly complex
equations.
To achieve this task, Nolan’s visual effects director Paul Franklin used the mathematical
genius of leading astrophysicist Kip Thorne to generate algorithms that guided the effects
software.
In fact, it was the astrophysicist himself who conceptualized the film along with producer
Lynda Obst, who Thorne worked with on 1997’s Contact.
Thorne’s passionate about explaining the mind-bending ideas of relativity to the general
public and was thrilled when he saw the final result.
The visuals are so powerful, so accurate, that Thorne’s planning on publishing two
academic journal articles based on the computer renderings of a black hole used in the film,
which led to a new scientific discovery: that light temporarily trapped around the black
hole produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern and a glowing accretion disk that
appeared above, below, and in front of the black hole.
“I never expected that,” Thorne says, “it was just amazing.”
No one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually built one for
the film.
Some of the single frames in these sequences of the film took 100 hours to render.
The entire movie is 800 terabytes of data.
Another thing that makes a lot of the science behind the film realistic is the script.
Steven Spielberg, who was originally set to direct, hired Chris Nolan’s brother, the
screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, to write the movie.
Nolan worked on it for four years, even studying relativity at the California Institute of
Technology to learn the science.
When Christopher Nolan took over as director, he emphasized the human element of the picture
and even codenamed the film “Flora’s Letter” because it’s essentially a letter to his
daughter, says star Jessica Chastain.
To film the scenes set on a dying, dusty Earth, the production planted a 500-acre cornfield
in rural Alberta.
Then they burned it all down in a "manufactured apocalypse."
Nolan was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey in many ways, including
“the one powerful Image” idea, which led to Nolan’s ambitious use of longer shots.
Like Nolan’s batman trilogy before it, Interstellar is shot on 70mm Imax film and is - according
to the director - “all about the theatrical experience, getting audiences to see it as
an experience in the theatre with other people.”
That’s why the movie will open to the widest ever release for a film, in 760 Imax theatres
around the planet.
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