14 DAY TRIAL // Fans of the work of Christopher Nolan, esteemed writer and director, have a motto: “In Nolan we trust.” That’s because he, together with his writer brother Jonathan, has this thing that he does whenever he’s working on a new movie, consisting of pretty much not talking about the movie at all, no matter what.
So, when Chris Nolan does drop hints, the world stops and pays attention because this isn’t a common occurrence.
The other day, at CinemaCon 2014 in Las Vegas, Nolan showed up to a panel for “Interstellar,” his star-studded film that drops in theaters in November this year and of which fans know, so far, only that it’s about “A group of explorers [who] make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.”
Since the first teaser trailer for it came out in December, fans have been speculating that it might deal with time-travel as well, though to a lesser extent than space travel. Nolan denied these reports at the event, The Wrap reports, saying that the film “is about using celestial shortcuts to reach parts of space that might otherwise be inaccessible.”
“It’s something that really looks at who we are as people,” he added. So, like with all his movies, Nolan will be using the awe-inspiring theme of space travel to analyze the human element in the equation. Kip Thorne, a famous theoretical physicist, acts as producer on “Interstellar.”
Nolan’s aim with “Interstellar” goes beyond showing space travel and wormholes, to ultimately create a “family film,” with the term understood by how it was used back in the day of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones,” not with today’s “pejorative connotations.”
One thing that fans surely know of Nolan is that he’s very much against using CGI for his films because he believes that’s detrimental to the overall narrative. For “Interstellar,” he revealed at CinemaCon, he had a production crew design and build spaceship sets instead of shooting against a green screen and having them created in post-production with computer imagery.
Nolan said that they’d been shooting “Interstellar” so far as a “documentary,” which duly expanded the film’s production schedule to include months of planning and designing the sets.
He also spoke about Matthew McConaughey, whom he cast in “Interstellar” after seeing his performance in “Mud,” but he refused to say which role he’d be playing. He did say though that he “needed somebody who was very much an everyman… somebody really relatable,” and Matthew was the right person for it.
“Interstellar” also features performances from Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Topher Grace, and Mackenzie Foy.