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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