Interview [Written]: Jonathan Nolan (“Interstellar”)

Two interviews with Jonathan Nolan whose writing credits include The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, all co-written with his brother Christopher Nolan.

The first interview is with /film:

Question: I first heard about this in I think June 2008 when Spielberg first got this idea from the Caltech talk. How did you get involved and what was that original pitch that Spielberg presented to you?

Nolan: I presented it to him. He and Linda Obst and Kip Thorne, Linda’s great friend, Kip Thorne, who’s a legend in physics over at Caltech. Steven had wanted to do a science exploration film that was grounded in good physics. He wanted to get it right. No huge flights of fancy. More real, authentic. They had been working for several months fleshing out the ideas, you know, in general terms and looking for a screenwriter. So I came in and sat down with Steven. And he wanted to do a contemporary space exploration film. I said, Steven, if it was a contemporary space exploration film, it would be about 15 minutes long. And it would consist of the they all go in to the Appropriations Committee and quietly die, right? We don’t do that anymore. It’s fucking done. We peaked. In the years when the anthropologists come down, they’ll find a little polyester flag in the Moon and they’ll say, fuck, they almost made it. Right?

Question: Yeah.

Nolan: Like they got so far. So that was 2006, 2007, so it was a somewhat misanthropic take on it. Probably not a great way to pitch it. But so I said, well, you know, it has to be set in the future. It has to be set in a future in which you understand, because that’s the case and anyone who’s looked into a realistic science and space exploration understands that we don’t do it anymore. It’s done. The Apollo missions were before we were kids and it’s over. But that’s not readily apparent to people. So you have to set it in a moment in the future in which that is readily apparent to people. And it’s clear. So it was great fun working with Steven for a couple years on the project. And hammering out a script.

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Question: So when your brother gets involved, he’s said that he took your screenplay and brought his own ideas that he had into it.

Nolan: Sure.

Question: But I haven’t heard what those ideas were. What did he bring to the story that we see now?

Nolan: The nature of our collaboration is just you’re wise not to try to unpack too carefully or pick apart who did what or who added what. But Chris and I had both since we were kids thought about this kind of film. And he brought to it a perspective on what if you’re reducing it to anything, you realize the second act of the film is very much composed of his ideas. And the things that I was so excited in the draft, in the original conception of the film are still very much alive in terms of it being about a guy and his kids.

Question: So that wasn’t something he brought, that was something that was always there.

Nolan: Well yeah, but this is the great thing about collaborating, Chris is the Devil’s in the details. So yes, that idea was there from the beginning in terms of Cooper and Murphy. But my brother always brings his own unique perspective to things and the ways to sort of ratchet up that, the tension and stakes of their relationship. From the beginning the idea was you have this massive scope of the film. You have to ground it in a very intimate, very small, recognizable, emotional truth, which was this relationship between Cooper and his kids.

The second interview is with Indiewire and in it, Nolan talks about the impact Close Encounters of the Third Kind had on him:

Nolan: That film captured something that I thought about a lot. In the preliminaries for putting this film together, before I started working on the script, Steven had Kip Thorne, who’s one of the producers on the film, convene all these amazing people — astronauts and physicists and all these other people in a room. And at one point in the conversation, Steven asked “how many of you would be willing to take a one-way trip to Mars?” They all had families, and a lot of them had kids, but they all raised their hand. And you just thought, “shit.” When I started the film, I was single, or rather, I wasn’t married; my wife and I were dating at the time and didn’t have kids. Now, I have a daughter, and it’s almost impossible to watch on that level.

It went from being this abstract hook …

Nolan: …to being very real in a way. And my brother did this clever thing along the way where I had written Murphy as a little boy — mainly because of the name — and because I was a happy accident, the third son in my family and not a planned member of the family … I just turned up. And I loved the idea of Murphy’s Law and this “happy accident” kid. But in my draft it was a boy, and my brother, of course, turned Murphy into a little girl. He has a daughter, and now I have a daughter (laughs) and I find it very difficult to engage with that level of the story. It’s very emotional. Movies are a little like space exploration: you just go. We’re lucky now, Chris’ kids are young enough, we’re able to shoot during the summer and his family can come with him. And I’m lucky enough to be working with my wife on a project right now and our daughter was able to come with us for the filming of it. And that’s really what the film is about: we’re all connected as a species, or trapped inside ourselves and disconnected from the other people around us. And it’s this paradoxical thing: we want to explore and achieve and see what’s out there — but we do it at the cost of not being with our families. It’s tricky.

For the rest of the /film interview, go here.

For the rest of the Indiewire interview, go here.

Along with his wife Lisa Joy, Nolan co-wrote the HBO pilot “Westworld” which Nolan also directed. Hopefully that will get picked up.

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