Steven Spielberg grew fascinated with “Interstellar” in the year he was attached to the project before dropping out and Christopher Nolan taking over as director.
In a conversation with Empire Magazine, Spielberg looked back on his brief year working on “Interstellar” with fondness. He remembered his fascination with the topic and being warned by screenwriter Jonathan Nolan that his brother would snap up the project if he dropped out.
“I was involved with ‘Interstellar’ for a year … and I became fascinated with it,” Spielberg said. “I spent a lot of time at the [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] in Pasadena, California, talking to the scientists there and the aerospace engineers.”
He added: “I actually hired Chris Nolan’s brother [Jonathan] to write the first and second draft for me, but it didn’t stick. Jonah actually said, ‘If there comes a point where you decide not to make this movie, I can tell you who’s gonna grab it. He’s already bugging me about it. And that’s my brother Chris.’
“He was absolutely right,” Spielberg admitted. “The second I decided not to make it, Chris jumped on board, probably the next day. ‘Interstellar’ was a much better movie in Chris Nolan’s hands than it would have been in mine.”
The director swap on the beloved 2014 sci-fi epic was touched on earlier this year by Nolan himself. In a conversation with Timothée Chalamet to celebrate the anniversary of the film, Nolan recalled his excitement for what his brother wrote and how he wanted to incorporate some time travel elements he’d been working on when he came aboard.
“Right after we collaborated on ‘Dark Knight,’ my brother [Jonathan Nolan] got the job and went to work with Steven [Spielberg]. He worked on it for a lot of years,” Nolan said. “It had incredible ideas and moved through all these different iterations, but until Steven was ready to make it, whatever it is, it never quite got that momentum. Steven went off to do another film, so it became available. I had a lot of conversations with Jonathan over the years and what he was doing and what his ambitions was. I was excited by it.”
He continued: “I was incredibly struck by his first act. I had been working on a time travel idea … things looking at time. I had half-baked projects that I hadn’t committed to. When it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, ‘How would you feel if I took this and tried to combine it with some of my ideas and change a bit with what it was?’ He was fine with it. He could tell the spirit of what I was trying to do was to get to what he was initially excited about it.”
“Interstellar” landed in theaters back in November 2014. It pulled in $681 million worldwide and netted five Oscar nominations. Although the film was more mixed in reviews than Nolan’s previous Batman trilogy, it has endured the test of time and become one of the most beloved sci-fi epics of the century.
Interstellar was such a good movie. I loved how seriously they took real astrophysics as a plot device.