Interstellar (film)

Interstellar
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Christopher Nolan
Written by	Jonathan Nolan Christopher Nolan
Produced by	Emma Thomas Christopher Nolan Lynda Obst
Starring	Matthew McConaughey Anne Hathaway Jessica Chastain Michael Caine Bill Irwin Ellen Burstyn
Cinematography	Hoyte van Hoytema
Edited by	Lee Smith
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures (North America) Warner Bros. Pictures (other territories)
Release dates	October 26, 2014 (2014-10-26) (premiere) November 5, 2014 (2014-11-05) (North America) November 7, 2014 (2014-11-07) (United Kingdom)
Running time	169 minutes
Countries	United States United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	$165 million

Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction adventure film directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine, the film features a team of space travelers who travel through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet. It was written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan; Christopher combined his idea with a script developed by his brother in 2007 for Paramount Pictures and producer Lynda Obst. He is producing the film with Obst and his wife, Emma Thomas. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, whose works inspired the film, acted as both an executive producer and a scientific consultant for the film.

Warner Bros., who produced and distributed some of Nolan's previous films, negotiated with Paramount, traditionally a rival studio, to have a financial stake in Interstellar. Legendary Pictures, which formerly partnered with Warner Bros., also sought a stake. The three companies co-financed the film, and the production companies Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions were enlisted. The director also hired cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema since his long-time collaborator Wally Pfister was busy working on Transcendence, his directorial debut. Interstellar was filmed with a combination of anamorphic 35 mm and IMAX 70 mm film photography. Filming took place in the last quarter of 2013 in locations in the province of Alberta, Canada, in southern Iceland, and in Los Angeles, California. The visual effects company Double Negative created visual effects for Interstellar.

Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Theatrically, it is scheduled for a limited release in North America (United States and Canada) on November 5, 2014 and a wide release on November 7, 2014. It will also be released in Belgium, France and Switzerland on November 5, 2014 and in additional territories in the following days, including the United Kingdom on November 7, 2014. For the limited release in North America, it will be released in 70 mm and 35 mm film formats in approximately 240 theaters which still project the formats, including at least 41 70 mm IMAX theaters. For the wide release, it will expand to theaters that will show it in digital format. Paramount Pictures will distribute the film in North America, and Warner Bros. will distribute it in the remaining territories.

Plot

In the near future, the earth is no longer able to sustain humanity. Crops are routinely ravaged by blight, dust storms scour the land, and mankind has regressed to a stateless, agrarian society. Cooper, a former NASA test pilot and engineer turned farmer lives with his family, including his father-in-law, son Tom, and ten year-old daughter Murphy—better known as "Murph"—who believes their house is haunted by a ghost that is trying to communicate to her. Challenging Murph to prove the ghost's existence through scientific inquiry, Cooper discovers that the ghost is directing them to a secret NASA installation led by Professor Brand.

Brand reveals to Cooper that humanity's fight to survive is a losing battle, and proposes that the solution is to colonise another galaxy. Cooper is recruited to pilot Endurance, an experimental spacecraft in search of a viable home world by way of a wormhole that has formed off Saturn. Endurance will follow the Lazarus Mission, a series of manned probes sent through the wormhole to survey potential planets as to their long-term sustainability. The data from Lazarus has given NASA three potential candidates: Miller, Edmunds and Mann, named for the astronauts who carried out the surveys.

Cooper's decision to join Endurance breaks Murph's heart, and the two part on bad terms. He joins Brand's daughter Amelia, physicist Rommily, geographer Doyle, and a multi-purpose robot designated TARS on a two-year trip to Saturn before crossing over into the new galaxy. While traversing the wormhole, Amelia encounters an extra-dimensional presence that she believes has placed the wormhole to save humanity.

Once through, Endurance follow the signal left by Miller's expedition, but quickly encounter a problem: the candidate planet is in close proximity to Gargantua, a nearby black hole, and due to its gravitational pull, time on the surface is distorted. Cooper proposes a solution to minimise the amount of time spent on the surface. They discover that the planet is inhospitable as giant tidal waves race across its surface. Doyle is killed and the ship inundated with water as the crew attempt to retrieve Miller's probe, and they return to Endurance to discover twenty-three years have passed.

Back on earth, Murph is now an adult and has joined NASA where she attempts to solve a physics problem that has troubled Brand for years: the question of how humans can escape the earth's gravitational pull en masse. Brand's health deteriorates and he admits that there is no hope Endurance will ever return, instead putting his faith in "Plan B", a mass repopulation project using fertilised embryos to start humankind over.

With the lengthy mission to retrieve Miller's data having consumed valuable resources, Endurance is forced to choose between following Mann or Edmunds. Cooper and Amelia clash, with Cooper accusing her of being compromised by her emotional attachment to Edmunds. The crew seek out Mann, finding him on an icy, ammonia-saturated planet and reviving him. Endurance receives a message from Murph, who reveals that Brand lied to them about their mission, and Cooper realises Mann lied about the viability of his planet. Unwilling to admit defeat or live with the shame of it, Mann murders Rommily and attempts to kill Cooper before fleeing to Endurance. Amelia saves Cooper and the two give chase, arriving in time to see Mann attempt an improper docking procedure with Endurance, killing himself as the airlock depressurises. Cooper is able to dock with Endurance and get the vessel back under control.

Realising that there is a chance to help Murph and save humanity, Cooper and Amelia formulate a plan to pilot Endurance to Gargantua's event horizon and jettison TARS into it to gather data on the singularity behind the black hole and slingshot themselves on a course to Edmunds' planet. Cooper lies to Amelia and releases himself into Gargantua, allowing her to escape the gravitational pull. He ejects before his craft is destroyed, and comes to a halt in an extra-dimensional space where time is not linear, represented by Murph's bedroom. Now able to witness every chapter of her life at once, he realises that he is her ghost and is able to relay the data collected by TARS through the dimensional barrier, allowing Murph to complete the equation.

His mission now complete, the extra-dimensional beings—an evolved form of human consciousness that has transcended the physical universe—close off the space, and he is released back into the Solar System through the wormhole near Saturn, where he is picked up by a NASA ship. He awakens aboard the NASA station, which is now serving as a waypoint to marshal the remainder of humanity to cross the wormhole, and is finally reunited with Murph, who is now an elderly woman. After saying good-bye to her one last time, he steals a NASA ship and enters the wormhole, searching for Amelia, who has located Edmunds' expedition and with it, a planet that can sustain life.

Cast

Astronaut Crew

• Matthew McConaughey as Cooper
• Anne Hathaway as Amelia Brand
• David Gyasi as Romilly
• Wes Bentley as Doyle
• Bill Irwin as the voice of TARS
• Josh Stewart as the voice of CASE

Additional Characters

• Jessica Chastain as Murph

• Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph
• Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

• Michael Caine as Professor Brand
• Casey Affleck as Tom

• Timothée Chalamet as Young Tom

• John Lithgow as Donald
• Topher Grace as Getty
• David Oyelowo as Principal
• Matt Damon as Dr. Mann
• William Devane as NASA official

Production

• Christopher Nolan – director, producer, writer
• Jonathan Nolan – writer
• Emma Thomas – producer
• Lynda Obst – producer
• Hoyte van Hoytema – cinematographer
• Nathan Crowley – production designer
• Mary Zophres – costume designer
• Lee Smith – editor
• Hans Zimmer – music composer
• Paul Franklin – visual effects supervisor
• Kip Thorne – consultant, executive producer

Development and financing

Director Christopher Nolan

The premise for Interstellar was conceived by film producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who collaborated on the 1997 film Contact. Based on Thorne's work, the two conceived a scenario about "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans" that would attract filmmaker Steven Spielberg's interest in directing. The film began development in June 2006 when Spielberg and Paramount Pictures announced plans for a science fiction film based on Thorne's treatment. Obst was attached to produce the film, which Variety said would "take several years to come together" before Spielberg directed it. By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay for Interstellar.

Steven Spielberg moved his production company DreamWorks in 2009 from Paramount to The Walt Disney Company, and Paramount needed a new director for Interstellar. Jonathan Nolan recommended his brother Christopher, who ultimately joined the project in 2012. Christopher Nolan met with Kip Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use of spacetime in the story. In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan was in negotiations to direct Interstellar. Nolan said he wanted to encourage again the goal of human spaceflight. He intended to write a screenplay based on his own idea that he would merge with his brother's screenplay. By the following March, Nolan was confirmed to direct Interstellar, which would be produced under his label Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions. The Hollywood Reporter said Nolan will earn a salary of $20 million against 20% of what Interstellar grosses. To research for the film, Nolan visited NASA as well as the private space program SpaceX.

Though Paramount and Warner Bros. are traditionally rival studios, Warner Bros., who released Nolan's Batman films and works with Nolan's Syncopy, sought a stake in Nolan's production of Interstellar for Paramount. Warner Bros. agreed to give Paramount its rights to co-finance the next film in the Friday the 13th horror franchise and to have a stake in a future film based on the TV series South Park. Warner Bros. also agreed to let Paramount co-finance "a to-be-determined A-list Warners property". In August 2013, Legendary Pictures finalized an agreement with Warner Bros. to finance approximately 25 percent of the film's production. Although it failed to renew its eight-year production partnership with Warner Bros., Legendary reportedly agreed to forego financing for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in exchange for the stake in Interstellar.

Writing

Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan was hired by director Steven Spielberg to write a script for Interstellar, and he worked on it for four years. To learn the science, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology while writing the script. Jonathan said he was pessimistic about the Space Shuttle program ending and how NASA lacked financing for a manned mission to Mars. The screenwriter found inspiration in science fiction films with apocalyptic themes, such as WALL-E (2008) and Avatar (2009). Entertainment Weekly said, "He set the story in a dystopian future ravaged by blight but populated with hardy folk who refuse to bow to despair." Jonathan's brother, director Christopher Nolan, had worked on other science fiction scripts but decided to take the Interstellar script and rewrite it with new ideas. Christopher kept in place Jonathan's conception of the first hour, which is set on a resource-depleted Earth in the near future. The setting was inspired by the Dust Bowl that took place in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Christopher instead revised the rest of the script in which a team travels into space.

Casting

Director Christopher Nolan said he became interested in casting Matthew McConaughey after seeing him in an early cut of the 2012 film Mud, which he had an opportunity to see since he was friends with one of its producers, Aaron Ryder. While McConaughey was in New Orleans, Louisiana filming for the TV series True Detective, Nolan invited the actor to visit him at his home. Anne Hathaway was also invited to Nolan's home, where she read the script for Interstellar. Paramount announced in April 2013 that both actors were cast in the film's starring roles. Nolan called McConaughey's character an everyman with whom "the audience could experience the story". Jessica Chastain was contacted while she was filming Miss Julie in Northern Ireland, and a script was delivered to her.

Other well-known actors eventually joined what would become "an all-star cast". Actor Irrfan Khan said he declined a role since he wanted to be in India for the releases of The Lunchbox and D-Day. Actor Matt Damon was cast in late August 2013 in a small role and filmed his scenes in Iceland.

Filming

Nolan filmed Interstellar with anamorphic 35mm and IMAX film photography. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema was hired for Interstellar, as Wally Pfister, Nolan's cinematographer on all of his past films, was working on his directorial debut, Transcendence. IMAX cameras were used for Interstellar more than any of Nolan's previous films. To minimize the use of computer-generated imagery, the director had practical locations built, such as the interior of a space shuttle. Van Hoytema retooled an IMAX camera to be handheld for shooting interior scenes. Some of the film's sequences were shot with an IMAX camera installed in the nosecone of a Learjet.

Nolan, who is known to keep details of his productions secret, strove to ensure secrecy for Interstellar. The Wall Street Journal reported, "The famously secretive filmmaker has gone to extreme lengths to guard the script to ... Interstellar, just as he did with the blockbuster Dark Knight trilogy." As one security measure, Interstellar was filmed under the name Flora's Letter, Flora being one of Nolan's four children with producer Emma Thomas.

Part of the filming in Iceland took place at the Svínafellsjökull glacier

The film's principal photography was scheduled to last for four months. It began on August 6, 2013 in the province of Alberta, Canada. Towns in Alberta where filming took place included Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge, and Okotoks. In Okotoks, filming took place at the Seaman Stadium and the Olde Town Plaza. For a cornfield scene, Nolan sought to grow corn, which he learned was feasible from his involvement as producer on Man of Steel (2013). Production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of corn that would be destroyed in an apocalyptic dust storm scene, intended to be similar to storms experienced during the Dust Bowl in 1930s United States. Additional scenes involving the dust storm and McConaughey's character were also filmed in Fort Macleod, where the giant dust clouds were created on location using large fans to blow cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air. Filming in the province lasted until September 9, 2013 and involved hundreds of extras as well as approximately 130 crew members, most of them local.

Filming also took place in Iceland, where Nolan had previously filmed scenes for his 2005 film Batman Begins. The crew transported mock spaceships weighing approximately 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) to the country, which was chosen to represent two extraterrestrial planets: one covered in ice, and one covered in water. A two-week Iceland shoot was scheduled and a crew of approximately 350 people, including 130 locals, worked on it. Locations included the Svínafellsjökull glacier and the town of Klaustur. While filming in Iceland, actor Anne Hathaway almost suffered hypothermia since her dry suit in a water scene was not secure.

After the Iceland shoot, the crew moved to Los Angeles to film for 54 days. Filming in California was relatively unusual since California's tax credit was not available for films with a budget greater than $75 million. Filming locations included the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, the Los Angeles Convention Center, a Sony Pictures soundstage in Culver City, and a private residence in Altadena. Filming concluded in December 2013, and Nolan started editing the film for its release in 2014. Production completed with a budget of $165 million, $10 million under what was allotted by Paramount, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures.

Production design

The Endurance spacecraft is based on the International Space Station

Interstellar features three spacecraft: the Ranger, the Endurance, and the Lander. The Ranger's function is similar to the space shuttle's, being able to enter and exit planetary atmospheres. The Endurance, the crew's mother ship, has a circular structure formed by 12 capsules: four with planetary colonization equipment, four with engines, and four with the permanent functions of cockpit, medical labs and habitation. Production designer Nathan Crowley said the Endurance was based on the International Space Station: "It's a real mish-mash of different kinds of technology. You need analogue stuff as well as digital stuff, you need back-up systems and tangible switches. It's really like a submarine in space. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose." Lastly, the Lander transports the capsules with colonization equipment to planetary surfaces. Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter".

The film also features two robots, CASE and TARS. Nolan wanted to avoid making the robots anthropomorphic and chose a five-foot quadrilateral design. The director said, "It has a very complicated design philosophy. It's based on mathematics. You've got four main blocks and they can be joined in three ways. So you have three combinations you follow. But then within that, it subdivides into a further three joints. And all the places we see lines—those can subdivide further. So you can unfold a finger, essentially, but it's all proportional." Actor Bill Irwin voiced and physically controlled both robots, but his image was digitally removed from the film and his voicing for CASE was replaced.

Sound

Sound engineers Gregg Landaker and Gary Rizzo mixed the sound for Interstellar, supervised by sound editor Richard King. Christopher Nolan said he sought to mix the film's sound to take maximum advantage of current sound equipment in theaters. Nolan paid close attention to designing the sound mix, for instance focusing on what buttons being pressed with astronaut-suit gloves would sound like. The studio's website said, "The sound on Interstellar has been specially mixed to maximize the power of the low end frequencies in the main channels as well as in the subwoofer channel."

Music

Composer Hans Zimmer, who scored Nolan's Batman film trilogy, also scored Interstellar. Zimmer and Nolan plan to move away from the trilogy's scores and to come up with a unique one. Zimmer said, "The textures, the music, and the sounds, and the thing we sort of created has sort of seeped into other people's movies a bit, so it's time to reinvent. The endless string (ostinatos) need to go by the wayside, the big drums are probably in the bin." Zimmer also said that Nolan did not provide him a script or any plot details for writing music for the film and instead gave the composer "one page of text" that "had more to do with [Zimmer's] story than the plot of the movie". Nolan said he told Zimmer, "I said, 'I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It's going to tell you the fable at the center of the story. You work for one day, then play me what you have written," and he embraced what Zimmer composed. Zimmer conducted 45 scoring sessions for Interstellar, which was three times more than for Inception. The soundtrack is scheduled to release on the 18th of November 2014.

Visual effects

The visual effects company Double Negative, which developed effects for Nolan's 2010 film Inception, worked on Interstellar. Visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin said the number of effects in the film was not much greater than in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises or Inception, but that for Interstellar, they created the effects first, so digital projectors could be used to display them behind the actors, rather than having the actors perform in front of green screens.

The Ranger, Endurance, and Lander spacecraft were created using miniature effects by production designer Nathan Crowley in collaboration with effects company New Deal Studios, as opposed to using computer generated imagery, as Nolan felt they offered the best way to give the ships a tangible presence in space. Created though a combination of 3D printing and hand sculpting, the scale models earned the nickname "maxatures" by the crew due to their immense size; the 1/15th scale miniature of the Endurance module spanned 25 feet, while a pyrotechnic model of a portion of the craft was built at 1/5th scale. The Ranger and Lander miniatures spanned 46 and 50 feet, respectively. The miniatures were large enough for Hoyte van Hoytema to mount IMAX cameras directly onto the spacecraft, thus mimicking the look of NASA IMAX documentaries. The models were then attached to a six-axis gimbal on a motion control system that allowed an operator to manipulate their movements, which were filmed against background plates of space using VistaVision cameras on a smaller motion control rig.

Influences

Director Christopher Nolan said influences on Interstellar included the "key touchstones" of science fiction cinema; Metropolis (1927), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Blade Runner (1982). Nolan said about 2001, "The movies you grow up with, the culture you absorb through the decades, becomes part of your expectations while watching a film. So you can't make any film in a vacuum. We're making a science-fiction film... You can't pretend 2001 doesn't exist when you're making Interstellar." He also said Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) influenced Interstellar's production design: "Those always stuck in my head as being how you need to approach science-fiction. It has to feel used—as used and as real as the world we live in." Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror influenced "elemental things in the story to do with wind and dust and water".

Nolan compared Interstellar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), as a film about human nature. He also sought to emulate films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). "When you say you're making a family film," he said, "it has all these pejorative connotations that it'll be somehow soft. But when I was a kid, these were family films in the best sense, and they were as edgy and incisive and challenging as anything else on the blockbuster spectrum. I wanted to bring that back in some way." He also cited the space drama The Right Stuff (1983) as an example to follow, and screened it for the crew before production. To emulate that film, he sought to capture reflection on the Interstellar astronauts' visors. For further inspiration grounded in real-world space travel, the director also invited former astronaut Marsha Ivins to the set.

Outside of films, Nolan drew inspiration from the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Scientific accuracy

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film, to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. "For the depictions of the wormholes and the black hole," he said, "we discussed how to go about it, and then I worked out the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein's general relativity equations."

In creating the wormhole and a rotating black hole, which opposed to a non-rotating black hole has an ergosphere, Dr. Thorne collaborated with visual effect supervisor Paul Franklin and a team of 30 computer effects artists at Double Negative. Thorne would provide pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the artists, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and ultimately resulted in 800 terabytes of data. The resulting visual effect provided Dr. Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and will lead to the creation of two scientific papers; one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community.

Christopher Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole would not be visually comprehensible to an audience and would require the effects team to unrealistically alter its appearance. However Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable provided that he maintained consistent camera perspectives, "What we found was as long as we didn’t change the point of view too much, the camera position, we could get something very understandable".

Marketing

Actor Matthew McConaughey was the focus of TV spots in Paramount's marketing campaign due to his performances in Dallas Buyers Club and True Detective

The teaser trailer for Interstellar debuted December 14, 2013 and featured clips related to space exploration, accompanied by a voiceover by Matthew McConaughey's character of Cooper. The theatrical trailer debuted May 5, 2014 at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It was made available online later that month, and for the week ending May 19 it was the most-viewed movie trailer, with over 19.5 million views on YouTube. The studio began airing TV spots for the film at the end of September 2014, expanding on the early focus on McConaughey, who the Los Angeles Times said had high visibility to the public after winning an Academy Award for Dallas Buyers Club and for an acclaimed performance on the TV series True Detective. A TV spot aired during Sunday Night Football to appeal to a broad audience.

Christopher Nolan and Matthew McConaughey made their first appearances at Comic-Con in July 2014 to promote Interstellar. The Hollywood Reporter said that prior to Nolan's appearance, he had "not spoken about his new movie at all". The pair participated in a brief discussion and screened a new trailer of the film. In the same month, Paramount Pictures launched a complex interactive Interstellar website in July 2014. The Hollywood Reporter said the website was "both cryptic and, just maybe, filled with hidden meaning". It reported that online users uncovered a star chart related to the Apollo 11 moon landing.

By October 2014, Paramount partnered with Google to promote Interstellar across multiple platforms. The film's website was relaunched to be a digital hub hosted on a Google domain. The website debuted the film's final trailer, and allowed visitors navigate theater locations and schedules to help them plan to see Interstellar in certain formats. It also provided navigation of film-related content across Google platforms, collected feedback from film audiences, and linked to a mobile app. The app, initially released by Paramount Digital Entertainment in September 2014, featured a game in which players could build solar system models and use a flight simulator for space travel. The Paramount-Google partnership also included a virtual time capsule compiled with user-generated content to be available in 2015. Through the partnership, the cast of Interstellar will also talk about the film through the video chat platform Google Hangouts. The initiative Google for Education will also use the film as a basis for promoting lesson plans for math science in schools around the United States.

Paramount is providing a virtual reality walkthrough of the Endurance spacecraft using Oculus Rift technology. It is hosting the walkthrough sequentially in four theaters, in New York City, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, DC, from October 6, 2014 through November 19, 2014. The publisher Running Press will release Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space, a book by Mark Cotta Vaz about the making of the film, on November 11, 2014. On November 7, 2014, W. W. Norton & Company will release The Science of Interstellar, a book by Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist who was a scientific adviser and executive producer for the film.

Release

Pre-release screenings

Prior to Interstellar's public release, Paramount CEO Brad Grey hosted a private screening on October 19, 2014 at an IMAX theater in Lincoln Square, Manhattan. Paramount then showed Interstellar to some of the industry's filmmakers and actors in a first-look screening at the California Science Center on October 22, 2014. On the following day, the film was screened at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California for over 900 members of the Screen Actors Guild. Actors McConaughey, Chastain, and Hathaway appeared afterward for a Q&A session. The film officially premiered on October 26, 2014 at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los, Angeles, California. It premiered in Europe on October 29, 2014 at Leicester Square in London.

Paramount imposed a review embargo for the advance screenings until October 27, 2014. Aside from the embargo, very positive messages about the film were posted on Twitter.

Box office forecast

In North America, Interstellar and Big Hero 6 will open the same weekend of November 7–9, 2014, with both forecast to earn between $55 million and $60 million. TheWrap said the pairing was "potentially a close race". It said Interstellar would appeal to men while Big Hero 6 would appeal to families. Scott Mendelson of Forbes called the race between the two films a "tight one" and compared it to competitions between Shrek 2 and The Day After Tomorrow as well as Monsters University and World War Z. Fandango reported that pre-sales for Interstellar were outpacing Christopher Nolan's earlier film Inception as well as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, released earlier in 2014. Interstellar also became the biggest pre-seller at the TCL Chinese Theatre.

Theatrical run

The historical landmark TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California had a 70 mm IMAX projector installed to show Interstellar

Interstellar was released early on November 4 at The Museum of Science & Industry IMAX Dome theater, and is scheduled for a limited release in North America (United States and Canada) on November 5, 2014 and wide release on November 7, 2014. The film will also be released in Belgium, France, and Switzerland on November 5, 2014 and in additional territories in the following days, including the United Kingdom on November 7, 2014. For the limited North America release, Interstellar will be projected from 70 mm and 35 mm film in approximately 240 theaters that still support those formats, including at least 41 70 mm IMAX theaters. A 70 mm IMAX projector was installed at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California to display the format. The film's wide release will expand to theaters that will show it digitally. Paramount Pictures will distribute the film in North America, and Warner Bros. will distribute it in the remaining territories. The film is expected to be released in over 770 IMAX screens worldwide which will be the widest global release ever in IMAX cinemas.

Interstellar is an exception to Paramount Pictures's goal to stop releasing films on film stock and to distribute them only in digital format. The Hollywood Reporter said the initiative to project Interstellar from film would help preserve an endangered format, an initiative supported by Christopher Nolan, J. J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Paul Thomas Anderson, and other filmmakers. The Reporter said that several theater owners saw the initiative as "backward", as nearly all theaters in the United States have been converted to digital projection.

Box office

Interstellar was released in the United States and Canada starting from November 4. The film topped the box office on Wednesday earning $1.4 million from 249 theatres (42 of which are IMAX screens) and IMAX accounted for 62% of it's gross.

Reception

Critical response

The Los Angeles Times reported, "Film critics largely agree that 'Interstellar' is an entertaining, emotional and thought-provoking sci-fi saga, even if it can also be clunky and sentimental at times." The film review website Metacritic surveyed 44 critics and assessed 34 reviews as positive, 9 as mixed, and 1 as negative. It gave an aggregate score of 75 out of 100, which it said indicated "generally favorable reviews". The similar website Rotten Tomatoes surveyed 144 critics and, categorizing the reviews as positive or negative, assessed 106 as positive and 38 as negative. Of the 144 reviews, it determined an average rating of 7 out of 10. The website gave the film an overall score of 74% and said of the consensus, "Interstellar represents more of the thrilling, thought-provoking, and visually resplendent filmmaking moviegoers have come to expect from writer-director Christopher Nolan, even if its intellectual reach somewhat exceeds its grasp."

Scott Foundas, chief film critic at Variety, called Interstellar "as visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done". Foundas said the film also felt more personal than Nolan's previous films. James Dyer, reviewing the film for Empire, awarded the film a full five stars, describing it as "Brainy, barmy and beautiful to behold ... a mind-bending opera of space and time with a soul wrapped up in all the science." Time Out London's Dave Calhoun also granted the film a maximum score of five stars, stating that it is "a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike". New York Post critic Lou Lumenick deemed Interstellar "a soulful, must-see masterpiece, one of the most exhilarating film experiences so far this century." Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film a full four stars and wrote, "This is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen — in terms of its visuals, and its overriding message about the powerful forces of the one thing we all know but can't measure in scientific terms. Love." He also stated that Jessica Chastain "deserves a Best Supporting Actress consideration for her work."

Describing Nolan as a "merchant of awe", Tim Robey of The Telegraph felt Interstellar was "agonisingly" close to a masterpiece, highlighting the conceptual boldness and the "deep-digging intelligence" of the film. Todd McCarthy, reviewing for The Hollywood Reporter, said, "This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that." Claudia Puig of USA Today called it a "flawed masterpiece", praising the visual spectacle and powerful themes, while criticizing the "dull" dialogue and "tedious patches inside the space vessel". Richard Corliss of Time gave the film a positive review, calling it "a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps". He further expressed his admiration for Nolan's "ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them." He conceded that "Nolan's reach occasionally exceeds his grasp" but accepted this occurrence. In his review for The Associated Press, Jake Coyle praised the film for its "big-screen grandeur", while finding some of the dialogue "clunky". He further described it as "an absurd endeavor" and "one of the most sublime movies of the decade".

David Stratton of At the Movies rated the film four and a half stars out of five, praising the film's ambition, effects and 70mm IMAX presentation, though critiquing the sound for being so loud as to make some of the dialogue inaudible, saying, "Last year's space movie, GRAVITY, was linear and essentially simple but Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR, which he scripted with his brother Jonathan, sets out to be compared to the legendary 2001, and almost achieves that level of excellence. This is not only a tremendously exciting space adventure [...] It's also a rich and thoughtful meditation on time and space and gravity." Conversely, cohost Margaret Pomeranz rated the film three out of five, as she felt the human drama got lost amongst the film's scientific concepts. The Guardian scored the film three out of five stars, calling it "a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour."

Accolades

Interstellar was nominated for Original Score for the Hollywood Music in Media Awards, contending with six other films. The advisory board received a five-minute trailer for the film that included Hans Zimmer's music.

Cultural impact

In months leading up to Interstellar's release, parody video mashups referencing the film were created with space-related films, such as Spaceballs (1987) and WALL-E (2008).

See also

• Wormholes in fiction
• List of films shot in Iceland

Further reading

• Thorne, Kip (November 7, 2014). The Science of Interstellar. Book about the science behind the film. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-35137-8.
• Vaz, Mark Cotta (November 11, 2014). Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space. Book about the making of the film. Running Press. ISBN 978-0-7624-5683-3.

External links

• Official website
• Interstellar at IMDb
• Interstellar at Rotten Tomatoes