Interstellar (2014)

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About

A widowed pilot leads a mission through a wormhole to find humanity a new home, knowing every hour he spends may cost him years with his children.

In a near future stripped bare by blight and dust, farming is the only work that matters and ambition has become a luxury nobody can afford. Joseph "Coop" Cooper, a former NASA pilot raising two children on a corn farm with his father-in-law, is one of the few who still looks upward. When a strange gravitational anomaly in his daughter Murph's bedroom leads him to the remnants of NASA operating in secret, he is offered the mission he never expected: to fly through a wormhole near Saturn and find a survivable world on the other side.

The choice costs him everything at once. To go is to leave Murph behind on a dying planet, and because of the way time bends near a supermassive black hole, the journey will age him far more slowly than the children waiting for him. Alongside Dr. Amelia Brand, Romilly and Doyle, and two wry military robots called TARS and CASE, Cooper follows the trail of earlier explorers sent through the wormhole years before, each of whom transmitted a single signal back and then fell silent.

What the crew finds tests both the science and the people carrying it out. A few hours spent on the wrong planet strip decades from the lives back home, a surviving astronaut proves that self-preservation outlasts idealism, and Murph, now a scientist herself, works on an equation whose missing term may be locked inside the black hole her father is falling toward. The film's final act turns its physics inward, arguing that the thing capable of reaching across time is not gravity alone but the pull of one person toward another.

Details

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writer/Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

Producer: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan, Lynda Obst

Tagline: The end of Earth will not be the end of us.

Running time: 169 minutes

Certificate: 12A (UK cinema, BBFC 23 October 2014) · 12 (UK home media)

Budget: $165 million

Box office: $681 million on original release · $774.7 million including later re-releases

Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Drama

Released: November 7, 2014 (United Kingdom) · November 5, 2014 (United States) · October 26, 2014 (premiere, TCL Chinese Theatre)

Music Composer: Hans Zimmer

Cast

Soundtrack

  • Score composed and produced by Hans Zimmer, released as Interstellar: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on November 17, 2014.
  • The 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison pipe organ of the Temple Church in London was chosen as the score's primary instrument.
  • Zimmer recorded 45 scoring sessions for the film, roughly three times the number he used on Inception (2010).
  • Nolan gave Zimmer no script and no plot details, only a single page describing a father leaving his child for work, and the score was built outward from that idea.
  • Dylan Thomas's 1951 villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is recited repeatedly through the film and works as a spoken motif alongside the score.

Franchise

Interstellar is a standalone film with no sequels or prequels. It sits within the run of original, large-format features Christopher Nolan made between his franchise work, alongside Inception (2010), Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), Oppenheimer (2023) and The Odyssey (2026).

Related

Trivia

  • Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acted as scientific consultant and executive producer, and the visual effects team's work on rendering a rotating black hole produced imagery accurate enough to be written up as peer-reviewed physics research.
  • Matt Damon's role as Dr. Mann was kept out of all trailers and marketing, and he took no billing on the poster, so that his appearance would land as a surprise.
  • Nolan had 500 acres of corn planted for the farm scenes rather than dressing an existing field, then sold the harvest afterwards to recover part of the cost.
  • The film was shot on 35mm anamorphic and 65mm IMAX film with no digital cinematography, and opened in film formats two days ahead of the general digital release in the United States.
  • TARS and CASE are not computer-generated. They are practical, articulated units operated on set by Bill Irwin, who also supplies TARS's voice.
  • The BBFC's classified theatrical print runs 168 minutes and 49 seconds, which is where the widely quoted 169-minute running time comes from.
  • Nolan withheld the script from Hans Zimmer entirely, so the earliest music was written before the composer knew he was scoring science fiction.

Critical Reception

Interstellar was received as an ambitious and visually extraordinary film whose emotional reach divided critics as much as its physics did. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 73% of 373 critic reviews are positive with an average score of 7.1 out of 10, and the site's consensus describes it as thrilling, thought-provoking and visually resplendent while suggesting its intellectual ambitions slightly outrun its grasp.

Praise concentrated on the scale and sincerity of the film-making: Hoyte van Hoytema's photography, the practical spacecraft and robot work, Zimmer's organ-led score, and a central performance from Matthew McConaughey that anchors the astrophysics in an ordinary father's grief. The sequence in which Cooper watches years of missed messages from his children is routinely cited as the strongest scene in Nolan's filmography.

Criticism focused on the dialogue used to carry the exposition, the audibility of the sound mix, and a final act that resolves relativity and grief in the same gesture. Audiences were markedly warmer than critics, and the film holds an 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 100,000 ratings. Its reputation has strengthened considerably since release, and its 2024 tenth-anniversary IMAX re-release sold out widely and added to a worldwide gross that now stands well above its original run.

Reviews

  • Rotten Tomatoes: 73% from 373 critic reviews, average 7.1/10.
  • Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 87% from more than 100,000 ratings.
  • At the 87th Academy Awards the film won Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.
  • Critics broadly agreed the film is visually and sonically remarkable, with disagreement centring on its dialogue and its emotional resolution rather than on its craft.

Links

Production

Interstellar began as a project developed by producer Lynda Obst with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who wanted a science fiction film built outward from real relativistic physics rather than around it. Jonathan Nolan wrote the initial screenplay, and when Christopher Nolan joined the production he merged that draft with a project of his own and rewrote it, taking a co-writing credit. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. financed the film jointly, an unusual arrangement between competing studios, with Legendary Pictures and Nolan's own Syncopy also attached and Emma Thomas producing.

Principal photography ran through 2013 in Alberta, Iceland and Los Angeles, using real locations in place of set extensions wherever possible. The Alberta shoot required 500 acres of corn to be grown specifically for the farm sequences, and Icelandic glacier and lava terrain stood in for the two candidate planets. Nolan shot on 35mm anamorphic and 65mm IMAX film with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, using no digital cameras, and projected the spacecraft's exterior views onto screens outside the cockpit windows so the actors were reacting to real imagery rather than to green screen.

The robots TARS and CASE were built and puppeteered practically on set by Bill Irwin, who also voices TARS. For the black hole Gargantua, the visual effects house Double Negative worked directly from Thorne's gravitational-lensing equations, and the resulting renders were detailed enough that the collaboration produced published physics research as a by-product of the effects work.

Box Office

Interstellar grossed $188 million in the United States and Canada and $493 million elsewhere, for a worldwide total of $681 million against a $165 million production budget on its original release. Subsequent re-releases have taken the cumulative gross to approximately $774.7 million.

The film set a worldwide IMAX opening record of $20.5 million from 574 IMAX screens, and sold an estimated 22 million tickets in North America. Deadline Hollywood calculated a net profit of around $47 million once marketing, talent participation and home media revenue were accounted for, placing it twentieth on its list of the most valuable blockbusters of 2014. A tenth-anniversary IMAX re-release in 2024 performed strongly enough to add materially to the film's lifetime total, a decade after its debut.

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