60 Fun Facts About Interstellar

Who directed Interstellar?

He co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, who had originally developed it for Steven Spielberg.

Which actor plays Cooper, the widowed pilot-turned-farmer who leads the Endurance mission?

He was fresh off his Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club when the film opened in November 2014.

Interstellar was released in which year?

It premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on October 26 before opening in early November.

The wormhole the Endurance crew travels through was placed near which planet?

The crew deduces it was created by mysterious beings they call "they," who turn out to be future humans.

What is the name of the supermassive black hole the three candidate planets orbit?

Rendering it accurately gave the film's physicist adviser new insights that led to three published scientific papers.

Which theoretical physicist and later Nobel laureate conceived the film and served as executive producer?

He wrote a companion book, The Science of Interstellar, explaining which parts of the film are established physics and which are educated guesses.

Who plays Dr. Amelia Brand, the biologist on the Endurance crew?

Her character ends the film alone on Edmunds' planet, kneeling at his grave and taking off her helmet to breathe the air.

Which actress plays the adult Murph, Cooper's daughter, for most of the film?

Mackenzie Foy plays her as a child and Ellen Burstyn plays her as an old woman on her deathbed.

Which veteran actor plays Professor John Brand, the NASA scientist behind the mission?

He confesses on his deathbed that Plan A, saving the people already on Earth, was never possible.

Who provides the voice (and puppetry) of the robot TARS?

He physically operated the block-shaped robot on set, and Josh Stewart voiced its companion CASE.

Which actor makes an uncredited appearance as Dr. Mann, the stranded scientist on the ice planet?

He was cast in late August 2013 and shot his scenes on a glacier in Iceland.

How does Dr. Mann die?

His botched attempt to seize the Endurance sends the ship spinning, setting up Cooper's "It's necessary" docking maneuver.

According to Romilly, every hour spent on Miller's planet costs roughly how many years back on Earth?

The planet orbits so close to Gargantua that a brief visit costs the crew decades, and Cooper returns to a backlog of 23 years of family video messages.

What natural hazard nearly kills the crew on Miller's water planet?

What look like distant mountains turn out to be waves, a consequence of the planet's proximity to the black hole.

The ring-shaped mother ship Endurance is made up of how many capsules?

The capsules were laid flat to mimic a clock face, and the ring rotates to generate artificial gravity.

What crop is Cooper growing on his farm when the film opens?

Production designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of real corn in Alberta, and the production sold the crop for a profit afterward.

Which composer wrote the score, built around a church organ?

Nolan gave him no script, only a one-page story about a father leaving his child for work, and Zimmer wrote the main theme from that.

The score's signature organ was recorded on a 1926 instrument in which London building?

The four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ became the primary instrument, giving the film its cathedral-like sound.

Interstellar won its only Academy Award in which category?

It was nominated for five Oscars in total; the black hole imagery that won was created by DNEG.

Roughly how much did Interstellar gross worldwide in its initial theatrical run?

A 2024 tenth-anniversary IMAX re-release added another $24 million.

The icy alien planet scenes were shot in which country?

The Svínafellsjökull glacier stood in for Mann's planet, while the farm scenes were shot in Alberta.

The Cooper farm and cornfield scenes were filmed in which Canadian province?

Towns used included Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge, Fort Macleod and Okotoks.

How long is Interstellar's running time?

That is nearly three hours, and Nolan shot more of it on IMAX cameras than any of his previous films.

Which director was originally attached to the project when it began development in 2006?

Jonathan Nolan was hired to write the script for Spielberg and later recommended his brother Christopher, who joined in 2012.

What is the higher-dimensional space where Cooper sees into Murph's bedroom in Interstellar called?

The set was physically built rather than rendered, with strands of light representing moments of time on the bookshelf.

Young Murph believes a 'ghost' is trying to communicate with her through what?

The falling books and later the dust patterns turn out to be Cooper himself, sending messages from inside the tesseract.

How does Cooper transmit the quantum data from inside the black hole to Murph?

The watch was the one he gave her before leaving, and the adult Murph finds it still ticking out Morse code decades later.

Which poem does Professor Brand recite as the Endurance launches?

Dylan Thomas's villanelle recurs throughout the film, and Michael Caine's reading of it became a trailer staple.

When Cooper adjusts TARS's humor setting to 75 percent, how does the robot respond?

Cooper then dials it down to 60 percent, and TARS's deadpan became one of the film's most quoted elements.

According to Cooper, what does Murphy's law actually mean?

He tells his daughter this to reassure her about being named after the law, and the film treats it as a statement about possibility rather than pessimism.

Complete Cooper's line: "Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to..."

The line was used on the film's posters and encapsulates the movie's argument against the era's abandonment of space exploration.

What does Amelia Brand argue is 'the one thing that transcends time and space'?

Her speech is dismissed by Cooper at the time but is vindicated when his bond with Murph turns out to be the key to the mission.

Which cinematographer shot Interstellar, replacing Nolan's regular collaborator Wally Pfister?

He shot on 35mm anamorphic and IMAX 70mm film and went on to shoot Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer for Nolan.

Which documentary provided the elderly-survivor interviews seen at the start of the film?

Nolan asked Burns for permission to use the real 1930s survivors' testimony as if it were about the film's future blight.

How did Nolan show space outside the ship's windows during filming, instead of using green screen?

The effects were created first so actors could react to the wormhole and black hole in real time.

What did the crew nickname the giant hand-sculpted and 3D-printed spacecraft models?

The word riffs on 'miniatures' because the models were anything but small; the Endurance model was over 25 feet across.

Some cinemas posted notices about the film's sound. What was the complaint?

Nolan said the mix was intentional, treating some lines as texture rather than information.

Which studio distributed Interstellar in the United States, with Warner Bros. handling international markets?

Paramount had been attached since Spielberg's 2006 announcement, and Legendary Pictures also co-financed.

What was Interstellar's production budget?

That came in $10 million under what the studios had allotted.

Which actor plays Tom, Cooper's son, as an adult farmer?

Timothée Chalamet plays Tom at fifteen, in one of his first film roles.

Which actor plays Romilly, the physicist who waits 23 years alone on the Endurance?

Wes Bentley plays Doyle, the crew member killed by the wave on Miller's planet.

Who plays Donald, Cooper's father-in-law who stays behind on the farm?

Lithgow's Donald is the one who says the world 'never needed engineers, we needed farmers.'

Which visual effects company created the black hole and wormhole imagery?

The team had worked with Nolan on Inception, and their Gargantua rendering fed back into published physics research.

The earlier one-way scouting flights to the candidate planets were named after which biblical figure?

Miller, Mann and Edmunds each sent back a beacon from a candidate world; only Edmunds' turns out to be habitable.

Where does Cooper wake up after being pulled out of the black hole?

The station is named after Murph, not him, and he finds her a revered elderly scientist near the end of her life.

What is Cooper's occupation before he is recruited for the mission?

NASA has gone underground because a starving public sees space travel as a waste; schools even teach that the Moon landings were faked.

Which producer developed Interstellar's premise with Kip Thorne, having worked with him on Contact?

Carl Sagan had set the two up on a blind date years earlier.

Which future star plays the 15-year-old Tom Cooper?

Casey Affleck plays the adult Tom, who eventually takes over the family farm.

Which Oscar-winning actress plays the elderly Murph near the end of the film?

Mackenzie Foy plays Murph at ten and Jessica Chastain plays her as an adult scientist.

Where did Jonathan Nolan study relativity to prepare for writing the screenplay?

He worked on the script for four years, and his brother Christopher joined the project in 2012.

Warner Bros. gave Paramount rights in which horror franchise to secure a stake in Interstellar?

The deal also included a stake in a future South Park film.

Which Tarkovsky film influenced Interstellar's 'elemental' imagery of wind, dust and water?

Nolan also cited Metropolis, 2001, Blade Runner, Star Wars and Alien as touchstones.

What was the name of the dismantled third robot found at Dr. Mann's base?

The 1.5-metre quadrilateral robots were designed to avoid looking human.

Interstellar's record IMAX opening weekend beat a mark previously held by which film?

It opened in 574 IMAX theatres and took $133 million worldwide in its first weekend.

Which visual effects company built the spacecraft miniatures with production designer Nathan Crowley?

Nolan preferred physical models to CGI to give the ships a tangible presence in space.

What Rotten Tomatoes critic score did Interstellar hold through 2025?

The consensus called it thrilling and thought-provoking, if occasionally clunky and sentimental.

Which fantasy author called Interstellar the most ambitious sci-fi film since Kubrick's 2001?

Spielberg later admitted the film was better in Nolan's hands than it would have been in his.

How much did the December 2024 tenth-anniversary re-release gross on its opening weekend worldwide?

It lifted the film's global total to about $720 million.

Which Okotoks ballpark in Alberta was among the film's shooting locations?

Shooting began on August 6, 2013, in towns including Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge and Fort Macleod.

Which astrobiologist criticised the film's blight scenario, noting oxygen loss would take millions of years?

He also pointed out that gravity should have pulled the ice clouds down.