CULTURE

T H E

A R T

O F

S C I E N C E

I N T E RST E L L A R U PDATE S
T H E H O L LY W O O D S PA C E
ODYSSE Y WITH A FABLE
BASED IN FACT

By JEFFREY KLUGER

Where no movie has gone before

Director Christopher Nolans Interstellar
crew includes Matthew McConaughey,
Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway
Photographs by Robert Maxwell for TIME
CULTURE | MOVIES

easier, because a sci-fi movie can take liber-

ties a nonfiction tale like Apollo 13 couldnt.
But in some ways he has it harder. Its
an awfully slippery slope once you start
getting glib with your physics, and what
starts with a Saturn V can end up with
warp drive, and no one takes you seriously
Its huge, its cold, its soulless. Its possessed of forces that would rip you to anymore. [You can use] science fiction as
ribbons the second you dared to step off the tiny planetary beachhead it has an escape from the constraints of reality,
permitted us. Whats more, it completely defies understanding, at least for Nolan said during a sit-down with Time,
anyone whos not fluent in the language of singularities and space-time and along with McConaughey, Chastain and
wormholes and all the rest. Hathaway, in Los Angeles on Oct. 22. But
But never mind, because we believe in it alland oh, how we love it. Big what were trying to do is observe those
cosmology has become our secular religion, a church even atheists can join. constraints and then move to the most ex-
It addresses many of the same questions religion does: Why are we here? How treme places we can with them.
did it all begin? What comes next? And even if you can barely understand the That opens up lots of narrative possibil-
answers when you get them, well, youve heard of a thing called faith, right? ities. Since time moves slower for a space
Like religion, cosmology has its high priests: Einstein and Hawking traveler than it does for people on Earth,
people who, like Muhammad and Jesus, dont even need second names. It has what of the commander (McConaughey)
lesser priests as well: Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tysonthe great communica- when he takes off on his humanity-saving
tors. It has its storytellers too, none more powerful than those in Hollywood. mission? To him its an extended business
And no moviemaker is currently more influential than Christopher Nolan, trip, but by the time he gets home, his
director of the coming-soon, dont-miss, shrouded-in-secrecy Interstellar. 10-year-old daughter could be middle-
The premise of Interstellar is simple enough. Earth is dying from an un- aged. If you fancy a wormhole in your
named blight, and its the job of a small band of astronauts (led by Matthew film, exactly what should it look like? If
McConaughey and Anne Hathaway) and scientists (Jessica Chastain and Mi- you want a black hole, how does a real one
chael Caine) to look for a new world to colonize before its too late. So far, that behave? A deep dive into those questions
could be the stuff of a Bruce Willis joy ridea rocket-jock movie in which lots isnt typical popcorn-feature fare, but our
of things blow up and lots of people die. appetite for it appears infinite.
But Interstellar has bigger ambitionsambitions that go hard at the phys- Nolan believes our fascination is rooted
ics and at those cosmic questions. Thats not easy if you want to keep your in the fact that we can gaze at the universe
movie entertaining. I watched Ron Howard successfully wrestle with the we wonder about: its visible, if unreach-
same challenges as he was making Apollo 13, a movie based on the book I able. You can actually look up at the sky
co-authored with mission commander Jim Lovell. In some ways Nolan has it and see this stuff. Thats the prime thing,

says Nolan. Looking up at the stars is the
primal connection.
Thats part of it, surely, but the other
part is that unlike the millennia of hu-
mans who have previously gazed skyward,
people of the modern era are actually puz-
zling out the cosmological physics. The
question I get more than any other when
I talk about being in space is, Did you
see a black hole? says retired astronaut
Marsha Ivins, a five-time shuttle veteran
who served as a technical consultant on
Interstellar. Black holes are the dinosaurs
of our era. If you could make a black-hole
plush toy, it would be a big seller.
So great is our hunger for a science
film that can both entertain and edify
that in the same week that Interstellar
opens, so does David Marshs deeply
moving film The Theory of Everything, a
biopic about Stephen Hawking, which
deals with much of the same science as
Interstellar while telling Hawkings per-
sonal tale. But the films are also linked
in a less obvious way. Hawkings lifetime
goal, as described both in the movie and
his books, has been to write a single, el-
egant equation that unites the large-scale
universeup at the level where stars
and planets and galaxies livewith the
quantum, or the province of bosons and
quarks and other subatomic particles. No-
PA R A M O U N T
lan is trying to do much the same, only in
cinematic and human terms.
time November 10, 2014
Life on a forbidding planet
Nolan on the set in Alberta, Canada.
He worked with cosmologist Kip
Thorne to get the details right
Black holes are the
dinosaurs of our
era. If you could
make a black-hole
plush toy, it would
be a big seller.
marsha ivins, veteran
shuttle astronaut and
technical adviser to
interstellar
Chilly Man, Hot Ideas
you could be forgiven for not liking
Chris Nolan right away. Film-industry
shorthand for him is that hes cold, and his
critics say his movieswhich include the
phantasmagoric dreamscape Inception and
the Batman Dark Knight trilogyare cold
as well. Its true that in the casual world
of Hollywood, where every day on the
set is dress-down day, Nolan is famously
buttoned-uprarely seen without a suit
and tie. He once told Londons Sunday
Telegraph that its a habit he adopted out of
respect for the crew. That may be true, but
it does nothing to make him seem more
approachable. He has no cell phone and
doesnt use email eitheragain, either
pose or preference, but hardly the behavior
of a man who wants to be reached.
But the cold label doesnt bear close
scrutiny. He is a father of four, married to
a woman he met when he was in college;
his wife Emma Thomas has been the co-
producer of all his movies. And he can be
playful with his stars, laughing easily and
intimately with them, and he takes care to
hand out credit whenever he can.
To keep Interstellar scientifically honest,
Nolan signed on Kip Thorne, the celebrated
theoretical physicist from Caltech who lit-
erally wrote the booknumerous books,
actuallyon much of the cosmology refer-
enced in the movie. So central has Thorne
been to cosmological science that he appears
as a character inThe Theory of Everything too.
With such an eminence on the Interstellar
set, the cast had to get up to speed on the
science fast, all except Hathaway, who came
to the movie already interested in and con-
versant with cosmology. But when she talks
about that fact, she is almost apologetic, de-
scribing her understanding as a grain of
sand on Kip Thornes beach of knowledge.
Nolan will have none of that. You
shouldnt be so shy about your interest in
science, he says. According to Kip, you
know a lot about it. Hes on record. Hath
away demurs: I was very poor at math
and science, but as I got older, it did start
to make more sense.
When it comes to the screenplay, No-
lan is equally generous. One of the niftier
details in the script involves the names
of Hathaways and McConaugheys
charactersBrand and Cooper, the names
of real astronauts. In McConaugheys case
the name is actually twice resonant, a
hat tip to both NASAs Gordon Cooper,
45
 CULTURE | MOVIES
whom everyone called Gordo, and to Hol
lywoods Gary, whom people called Coop.
The characters in Interstellar address Mc
Conaugheys Cooper in the same abbrevi
ated way, a little wormhole of its own that
neatly links the lone commander stepping
forward to save the planet in Interstellar
and the lone sheriff doing the same for
Hadleyville in High Noon. Sweet touch, but
Nolan deflects credit to his brother Jona
than, who co-wrote the script.
The science, to hear cosmologists tell
it, can be spot-on too. For all the merits
of last years space adventure Gravity,
it went soft on that partparticularly
when it came to orbital mechanics, with
the entire movie turning on an accident
that could never happen. But for Interstel-
lar, Thornes equations were even incorpo
rated into the special effects to ensure that
things look the way they should. Kip has
calculated the ray tracings going through
the wormhole geometry, says Princeton
cosmologist J. Richard Gott. What he de
termined is that a wormhole should look
like a mirrored ball that might be sitting
in your garden, except that when you
looked through it youd see a garden on
Alpha Centauri. And in Nolans hands, it
does look like that.
Its hard not to admire the respect No
lan has for the nonfiction history that
informs this fictional film as well. At
WORLDS COLLIDE: SPACE TRAVEL AND HOLLYWOOD
The age of movies and the age of space exploration both dawned early in the 20th century, and
theyve been growing up together ever since. Here are some of the big moments in each of those
strange dimensions.
F MARCH 16, 1926
A Robert Goddard
C fueled rocket
T
1900 1910
F LE VOYAGE
DANS LA
I LUNE (1902)
C This French
T silent by
the Mlis
I brothers
O is the first
N science-
fiction film
46
one point, the Interstellar plot calls for the
spacecraft to begin spinning at 67 revolu
tions per minute, a speed that can lead to
vertigo, and we see McConaugheys and
Chastains characters struggling not to
black out. Its a beautifully shot scene, and
it could stand on that all by itself. But if
youre deep in NASA geekdomwhich
Nolan knows many of his viewers will
bethe moment recalls a similar spin-up
at almost exactly the same 67 r.p.m. aboard
Gemini 8 in 1966, a mishap that nearly cost
the lives of astronauts Neil Armstrong and
Dave Scott. That parallel is no accident.
I did add that to the script based on
that Gemini story, Nolan says. Those
are the missions we kept coming back
to. That program felt the most raw and
experimental.
McConaugheys performance plays
into that toothe pilot out in here-be-
dragons territory, trying whatever he can
to keep his mission going. Its similar to
the way Lovell often described the Apol
lo 13 experience to meturning over card
after card in a mortal game of solitaire and
playing each one the best way he could.
Every hero doesnt go do this great big
hero thing, McConaughey says. They do
the simple thing over and over and over.
And they have endurance and they have
persistence and they stick to it. That
hero remains necessary to human affairs
OCT. 4, 1957
USSR launches
launches first liquid- Sputnik, the
first satellite
1920 1930
whether heor sheis a Western pio
neer or a space explorer. No matter how
much technology has evolved, says Mc
Conaughey, it comes back to human will,
human chutzpah, human resilience.
Theres a similar authenticity to the
part of Interstellar that takes place on
Earth. The scourge thats killing the planet
wipes out crops and turns the world into
one great dust bowl. Nolan employs the
documentary trope here, with a few el
derly earthlings looking into the camera
and describing the wasteland their world
has become. If it sounds eerily like those
actors know exactly what theyre talking
about, its because they doand most of
them arent actors. Theyre survivors of the
real 1930s Dust Bowl who were originally
interviewed by Ken Burns for his 2012
documentary on those plague years.
I was watching it for research and was
so moved by it, Nolan says. We could not
in the film make it as bad as it really was or
people wouldnt believe it.
But the Interstellar dust bowl was bad
enough, and that made the scene in which
McConaughey leaves to save the world the
most wrenching moment in the movie.
No fool that 10-year-old daughter of his
played by Mackenzie Foywho must
stay behind on the earthly wasteland. She
knows that Dad may be gone for decades.
Dad, meanwhile, a frustrated rocketeer
APRIL 12, 1961
Yuri Gagarin becomes
first man in space
FEB. 20, 1962
John Glenn becomes
first American to
orbit Earth
MARCH 18, 1965
Alexei Leonov makes
first spacewalk
1940 1950 196
FORBIDDEN
PLANET (1956)
Sci-fi goes wide-
screen for the first
THE DAY THE EARTH film set entirely on
another planet
STOOD STILL (1951)
Aliens, fearing the atom
bomb in the hands of
unruly humans, bring a
warning to Earth
 who was grounded after the blight hit obsession for her. Its a way not to feel, and
and government space programs became its how she realizes that science and the
an unaffordable luxury, suddenly sees his spiritual world are the same thing.
M O V I E T I M E L I N E : E V E R E T T (8); G R AV I T Y: W A R N E R B R O S . S PA C E T I M E L I N E : 1 9 2 6 : G E T T Y I M A G E S; 1 9 57, 1 9 6 2 , 1 9 8 6 , 2 0 0 3 : A P ; 1 9 6 9, 2 0 14: N A S A

ticket to ride. So is it selfish to leave? (Yes.)
But isnt it selfless too, since he just might
save the worldincluding his child? (Yes
again.) Both father and daughter know
Every hero doesnt all those painful truths, and call the di-
rector cold if you want, but the scene
go do this great absolutely scalds.
Cooper, in my mind, felt like he got
big hero thing. screwed out of being what he was put here
Nolan doesnt hesitate to call that spiri-
tuality religion, and Hathaway, the science
student in the Interstellar cast, sees things
that way too. I might botch the quote,
she says, but I just kept thinking about
Einstein saying, Science without religion
is lame; religion without science is blind.
For the record, she didnt botch the quote.

They do the simple to be, says McConaughey. Now he has a

chance to go experience his dream again,
Keeping It Real
hathaways perfect recall of ein-
thing over and and on top of that, oh, he may save the spe-
cies. But he also has to make his daugh-
stein is a reminder that movies have be-
come a real source of scientific inquiry for
over and over ... ter feel safe. People will take action if its
personalin their house, in their kitchen.
millions of people in an age when science
itself can be too baffling and complicated
and they stick to it. That dual perspectivethe cosmos
and the kitchenis a big part of what sets
to comprehend. Which is why the way
Nolan treats the science is so reassuring.
matthew mcconaughey Interstellar apart from the other movies to It wasnt just the wormhole that was
which it will be compared, particularly handled well; it was the business of time
Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. dilation too. When the astronauts make
It speaks to the thematic hugeness and a brief stop on a planet that is so close to
the emotional aridness of 2001 that the the gravity well of a black hole that one
movies most memorable character is the hour spent on its surface is the equivalent
HAL 9000 computer, who may have be- of seven years on Earth, the device isnt
trayed the crew but still breaks your heart placed in the script just to create dont-
when he pleads for forgiveness as astronaut waste-a-second tensionthough it does.
Dave Bowman is shutting him down. Inter- Its because thats how the science would
stellar suffers from no such bloodlessness. really work.
Chastains character spends much of One of the defining features of a black
the movie in a state of coiledand some- hole is that it imprints a gravitational
times uncoiledrage. But when shes at field around it, says cosmologist and best-
her blackboard, working on her equations, selling author Brian Greene of Columbia
she relaxeseven exults. Shes protected University. And gravity doesnt just pull
MARCH 16, by the numbers, Chastain says. Its an on matterit pulls on time itself. You can
1966 DEC. 24, 1968
Gemini 8 spins Apollo 8 becomes
out of control first manned
mission to orbit
JAN. 27, 1967 the moon FEB. 1, 2003
Gus Grissom, Seven die
Ed White and aboard space
Roger Chaffee JULY 20, JAN. 28, shuttle Columbia JULY 21, DEC. 4, 2014
die in Apollo 1 1969 APRIL 12, 1986 2011 (PROJECTED)
launchpad fire Apollo 11 1981 Seven die Last shuttle Unmanned Orion
achieves First aboard space mission ends; spacecraftNASAs
first manned shuttle shuttle all shuttles next crew vehicle
moon flight Challenger retired will have first test
landing flight

60 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

2001: A SPACE THE RIGHT STUFF

ODYSSEY (1968) (1983)
Stanley Kubricks The story of the Mercury
epic meditation on astronauts and Americas
human destiny is a CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF first forays into space APOLLO 13 GRAVITY (2013)
game changer THE THIRD KIND (1977) (1995) Romanticizes
Steven Spielberg brings The actors are space travel
enchantment to a tale the first to film in after NASA shut
of aliens summoning near zero-gravity down its shuttle
baffled earthlings conditions program

47
CULTURE | MOVIES
think of space and you can think of time,
but if you think of them together as the
horizontal and vertical threads in a weave,
you realize that you cant stretch one with-
out stretching the other.
Just as true, if far trickier, is another
aspect of black holes. Its received wisdom
that what happens in a black hole stays in a
black hole. But suppose your plot requires
information in the form of some kind of
energy to come back out or the human
species dies? As it happens, theres a sci-
entifically honest way to do that, thanks
to something called Hawking radiation,
which lets telltale particles break free,
providing clues to whats going on within.
Information about whatever went
into the black holestars, planets, Buicks,
typewritersis shredded, says Prince
tons Gott. But the Hawking radiation
comes back out, so some of that informa-
tion could come out too. This left Nolan
free to play within the mysterious world
inside the black hole, and he doesto diz-
zying effect.
Closing the Gap
a critical part of what is likely to be
the success of Interstellar is the mind-virus
quality of so many of Nolans films. It was
impossible to watch Inception and then go
to bed without the mysteries of the dream
world you were about to enter noodling at
your thoughts. The same was true of your
awareness of the fragility of memory
and the destruction of the self that can
result when its lostthat came from
48
watching 2000s Memento, a mystery in-
volving a man with anterograde amnesia.
Interstellar will unavoidably help us
look at the cosmos more as cathedral than
voida place to contemplate the riddles
of space and time, yes, but life, death and
love too. Thats explicit in the movie. My
character is someone who tries to connect
with love through science, says Chastain.
And when she does, she blossoms.
And its implicit too. Its not for nothing
that Hathaways astronaut character is a
trained biologist and not, say, an engineer.
Shes engaged with the science of life. It
sounds like, I dont know, such a hippie
thing, she says. But go stare at a leaf. You
can draw molecular charts, you can talk
about photosynthesis or decomposition.
But just staring at it is such a treat.
Both of those imponderablesthe sci-
ence and the treatare things we can rare-
ly wrestle with on our own. So we refract
them through our philosophy and our
George Jetson 2.0 Nolan and faith and our equations too, trying to tease
McConaughey humanize Cooper as out the colors that will make them make
a father first, an adventurer second sense. We need all the encouragement we
can get to keep asking those questions,
because their complexity can sometimes
make us duck them entirely.
Long ago, in May 1969more than a
year before Nolan was bornthe crew of
Apollo 10 was orbiting the moon, prepar-
ing to take the lunar module out for a final
test drive low over its jagged mountains
in preparation for the first landing, which
My character is was just two months away. The night
before that hair-raising ride, astronaut
someone who Gene Cernan looked out his spacecrafts
window at the clay-gray moon 60 miles
tries to connect below, and his thoughts and words were
with love through captured by the onboard voice recorder
that operated throughout the entirety of
science. And all the Apollo missions.
Where do you suppose a planet like
when she does, this comes from? he asked. Do you sup-
pose it broke away from theaway from
she blossoms. the Earth like a lot of people say?
Dont ask me, babe, his crewmate
jessica chastain John Young answered. I aint no cosmolo-
gist. I dont care nothing about that.
It sure looks different, Cernan said,
trailing off.
Cernans question hung unanswered
in the air, and before long the men turned
to other, more immediate matters. That
chasmbetween the machinist and the
poet, the engineer and the philosopher
PA R A M O U N T (2)
is one that has always existed between and
within all of us. It is the job of stories like
Interstellar to help us close the gap. n
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