Artists don’t just build their audiences; they train them. And no filmmaker in recent memory has trained their audience as well as Christopher Nolan. People don’t just show up to Nolan’s movies—although they do, in droves. (With the exception of the pandemic-hampered Tenet, every movie he’s released in the past 18 years has cleared more than $500 million worldwide.) They go out of their way to watch them when and how he prescribes. Studios have a hard time coaxing ticket-buyers out of the house in the first place, but Nolan’s dedication to shooting and screening his movies on film—his insistence that for all the technological advances of recent years, the passing of light through celluloid offers an experience that no digital analogue can match—has sparked a stunning reversal in theatrical exhibition, with theaters paying to reinstall the projectors they unceremoniously junked in the post-Avatar rush to digitize the industry. Oppenheimer screenings in Nolan’s preferred 70mm IMAX sold out for weeks on end, and if you want to score a ticket to one of the 10 theaters in North America showing Interstellar in the same format for the weeklong 10th anniversary rerelease that begins today, your only hope is paying at least double the face value on eBay. If you’re willing to settle for digital IMAX, good news! There are still plenty of seats available, as long as you’re willing to start watching the nearly three-hour movie at 5:30 in the morning.
What the industry calls Premium Large Format exhibition is normally reserved for visual spectacle, a tradition that goes back as far as Abel Gance’s silent 1927 epic Napoléon, which employed three projectors running side by side to create a widescreen climax tinted the colors of the French flag. When Quentin Tarantino shot The Hateful Eight on 70mm film, many critics accused him of squandering the high-resolution image on a story that is largely confined to a single room. But with Oppenheimer, Nolan asserted that his actors’ faces were as worthy of IMAX’s massive screen as any Mission: Impossible stunt. Because IMAX cameras are difficult to shoot with in close quarters—among other things, the noise of the mechanism drowns out the actors’ dialogue—Nolan’s movies had effectively enforced a visual split between screen-filling action and intimate drama, with the latter reduced to a narrow horizontal strip. But Oppenheimer worked to blur that distinction, giving its protagonist’s internal dilemmas as much cinematic real estate as the eyebrow-singeing astonishment of the Trinity test. The eyes of a man contemplating his fate loomed as large as the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb.
Not every drama requires or even benefits from such oversized presentation. In order to get from the comic-book morality of the Dark Knight trilogy to Oppenheimer’s open-ended ambiguity, Nolan had to find a way to make interpersonal conflicts feel as big as any battle to the death. And Interstellar was the movie where he figured it out.
Although Nolan became a father in 2001, Interstellar was, according to Emma Thomas, his producer and the mother of his four children, the first movie he made to “watch with his kids.” It’s a slightly funny statement considering that Interstellar is a lengthy heartbreaker about the looming extinction of the human race and the follow-up to Nolan’s three movies about Batman. But it’s the first of Nolan’s movies to be driven by the relationship between a parent and his child—a daughter who, not coincidentally, was the same age as Nolan’s eldest, Flora.
Set in an unspecified near future after a global ecological catastrophe has ravaged Earth’s crops and most of humanity has starved to death, Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a former NASA pilot who has been grounded by the apparent end of the space program, forced to work the land instead of reaching for the stars. Born, as his father-in-law (John Lithgow) puts it, either “40 years too late or 40 years too early,” Cooper (no one calls him by his given name) was trained for a future that now seems impossible, raised on a past that his daughter’s teachers, whose “updated” textbooks teach that the moon landing was faked to drive the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, deny ever existed. His daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), is a middle-school STEM prodigy, but unlike her father, she still believes there are things in the universe beyond the reach of science, like the “ghost” who occasionally pushes books off her bedroom shelves.
That ghost eventually leads Murph and Cooper to NASA, which, rather than being shut down, has just relocated deep underground. With the world’s resources dwindling, spending untold billions on space exploration has become politically untenable, but a small group of true believers have kept at it, reasoning that the only hope for the long-term survival of the human race is to find a new home among the stars. A wormhole that has mysteriously appeared, or been placed, near Saturn offers a gateway to a distant star system with planets that seem capable of supporting life, but the mission needs a pilot, and Cooper is the only person left who’s old enough to have experience flying a real spacecraft.
Doing his job, though, means leaving his home, and while his father-in-law and his son (Timothée Chalamet) understand his need to fulfill his destiny—a man’s gotta do, etc.—Murph is devastated, so much that she can’t even bring herself to say goodbye. But Cooper has to go, to ensure the survival of not just humanity but of his own sense of himself.
A younger Christopher Nolan might have treated Murph’s feelings of abandonment as collateral damage, a regrettably unavoidable consequence of Cooper’s dedication to his duty. Nolan’s heroes are defined by their obsessive quests, often to the exclusion of all else: The one thing Memento’s amnesiac protagonist knows is that he has to find the man who killed his wife, and The Prestige’s mad magicians make unimaginable sacrifices for the purpose of putting on a good show. But Interstellar gives Murph equal standing, particularly in its second half, when, thanks to the time-dilation effects of general relativity, she’s played by a grown-up Jessica Chastain. Cooper’s dilemma is that of any father whose job takes them away from their young children, stranded at work light-years away while they go on without him. When he’s forced to explore a planet whose extreme gravity makes time move more slowly for him—for every hour on the surface, seven years go by back on Earth—Cooper’s panic is driven not by the tsunami that threatens to destroy his spacecraft but by the thought of how much of his daughter’s life is slipping away with every instant. It all goes by so fast.
As the elderly astrophysicist who mentors both Cooper and his daughter, Michael Caine tells Murph that he’s afraid not of death but of time. He’s thinking of his own time and of his species’, both of which are running out, but also of a dimension that physics has yet to conquer. For the fifth-dimensional “bulk beings” who act as Interstellar’s deus ex machina, moving through time is as simple as crossing a room. But they have trouble navigating to a specific point, because without limitations on their physical or temporal presence, they’ve lost the sense of urgency that gives meaning to human connections. It’s only by piggybacking on Cooper’s grief, his anguish at leaving Murph behind and the guilt he feels for breaking his promise to return, that they’re able to reach back to the precise moment where they can do the most good. Across untold expanses of space and time, the thread that connects a father and his daughter is humanity’s sole lifeline.
In other words, love conquers all. It’s a happy accident that Interstellar began life as a script that Nolan’s brother Jonathan was writing for Steven Spielberg, a director who has never shied away from sentiment, and one whose movies return again and again to the pain of children abandoned by their parents. Perhaps Nolan would have found his way to more emotionally transparent filmmaking on his own. (Parenthood has a way of making softies of the hardest men.) But just as Cooper’s wormhole provides him with a shortcut through space-time, Interstellar’s Spielbergian origins gave Nolan a way to speed-run the path from puzzle-box mysteries to misty-eyed dad movies. If he made Interstellar to watch with his own children, it feels less like a present and more like a promise, a father’s way of saying that even though he has to leave, he will always come back, just as Cooper does in the movie’s tearjerking finale.
Across the 26-year span of Nolan’s career, his male protagonists have wrestled with understanding the emotional world in scientific terms, constructing elaborate schema like Memento’s memory aids or Inception’s nested dreams to cope with feelings of elemental loss. But in Interstellar, he gives Anne Hathaway’s Brand, a fellow astronaut who is, like Murph, the daughter of a man preoccupied with the material world, a critical insight: What if those two ways of understanding the forces that shape the world are, at root, the same? “Love isn’t something we invented,” she tells Cooper. “It’s observable, powerful … it has to mean something.” Restating complex ideas as cloying truisms is one of Hollywood screenwriters’ favorite tricks, and no matter how choked up McConaughey’s performance gets you, it’s hard not to wince at the clumsiness of a sentiment like “Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future.” (Maybe that sounds better in five dimensions.) But the depths that Interstellar allowed Nolan to access are worth the occasional sentimental clunker, and the ability to tap into emotions without needing to explain them has made his movies since then richer and more intuitive. Christopher Nolan has long been one of cinema’s most accomplished technicians, but he didn’t become a great filmmaker until he became a great sap.
