Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Accurately Predicted One Thing

“Oppenheimer” might have become the highest-grossing biopic of all time and the Dark Knight trilogy might have produced some of the most widely-celebrated superhero movies of all time, but Christopher Nolan’s real emotional masterpiece is 2014’s “Interstellar.” The film stars Matthew McConaughey as a widower NASA pilot who agrees to lead an expedition to a black hole named Gargantua. Somehow, the film manages to be Nolan’s most epic and spectacular effort while simultaneously being his most grounded and emotionally affecting. “Interstellar” stunned with its visual effects and ambitious, galaxy-spanning storytelling, but it remained fixed in the minds of viewers long after viewing for its touching story about a father inexorably drawn towards a higher calling who sacrifices being present for his daughter in the process.

Much has been written about how “Interstellar” is Nolan’s most emotional film and a true outlier in his oeuvre as a result, but there simply is no denying that the visual effects in the film were just as powerfully compelling as the storyline. Guided by an ethos that eschewed futurism for a more practical aesthetic, Nolan created a sci-fi epic that felt realistic throughout, even when its characters were traversing tsunami planets and breaching the event horizon of black holes. In fact, in the latter’s case, Nolan’s commitment to scientific accuracy led him and his visual effects team to create a version of a black hole that, some years after “Interstellar” debuted, turned out to be pretty darn close to how one of these mysterious cosmological objects actually looks in real life.

A $636 million success upon its 2014 debut, “Interstellar” became a box office hit all over again when it was re-released to IMAX theaters in 2024. What’s more, the film received a 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition set which includes both a 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray edition of “Interstellar” as well as a third disc full of both new and existing bonus content. One of the featurettes included on this disc revealed some fascinating details about how Christopher Nolan and his crew crafted the visuals of the film.

The climax of “Interstellar” sees Matthew McConaughey’s Joseph “Coop” Cooper enter Gargantua, beginning a journey that Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema somehow managed to make comprehensible while conveying the unfathomable weirdness of such a thing. But even before Coop finishes his journey and winds up in his timeline tesseract, Nolan and Co. had to worry about depicting Gargantua itself.

Luckily, the director was helped throughout the development of “Interstellar” by physicist Kip Thorne, who lent his expertise to the project to maintain a commitment to scientific accuracy. Though he wasn’t initially brought on to consult on the look of the black hole at the center of the “Interstellar” universe, as IGN reports, Thorne pushed to be able to work on the visual design of Gargantua. In a preview of a new featurette from the Collector’s Edition named, “The Future Is Now: A Look Back at Interstellar,” Nolan talks about how resisted Thorne’s request at first to avoid a “too many cooks” situation but ultimately agreed to let the physicist have his input.

It turns out that this was the best decision the director could have made, as Thorne’s expertise made for a black hole design that, though speculative, turned out to be remarkably accurate.

In 2019, The New York Times published the first-ever image of a black hole, captured by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The image depicted a black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, some 55 million light-years from Earth, and showed an imperfect ring of orange light around a black circle. While the image by itself is striking for being the first of its kind, for Christopher Nolan, this little glowing orange orb was significant for another reason — namely that it showed Kip Thorne’s predictions about the look of a black hole were startlingly accurate. In the “The Future Is Now” featurette, Nolan recalled how he called the physicist upon seeing the picture and said, “It’s a good thing you were right.”

Considering how mysterious black holes are, it was remarkable that Nolan and Co. managed to make Gargantua feel as real as it does in the final film, let alone accurately predict what a real black hole would look like when captured on camera. While it doesn’t necessarily add directly to the emotional impact of the film, crafting a version of space and its various features that feels realistic indirectly helps to make what is an otherwise epic tale feel grounded throughout, thereby helping the emotional aspects of the film to retain their authenticity by extension.

As such, Nolan both accomplished his one goal for “Interstellar” by having audiences vicariously weigh emotions with a sense of duty, but also ensured his movie worked as a spectacle. What’s truly impressive is that the director didn’t rely on fantastical ideas entirely removed from reality in order to conjure that sense of spectacle, and instead adhered to the reality of the cosmos itself to give “Interstellar” its grandiosity — surely something that proves the man’s reputation as one of the premiere directors of his time is well-earned.