58 Fun Facts About Interstellar

Early in Interstellar, which machines leave the fields by themselves and gather at Cooper's farmhouse?

Combine harvesters: the unmanned machines peel off from the fields one by one and roll up to the house, and magnetism gets the blame.

Which actor plays Cooper, the father who leaves his children to lead the Endurance mission in Interstellar?

Matthew McConaughey caught Christopher Nolan's eye in an early cut of the small drama Mud, before his Oscar; the director wanted an everyman the audience could experience the story with.

In Interstellar, the wormhole the Endurance crew travels through sits near which planet?

Saturn is a two-year voyage for the Endurance, and the wormhole beside it had appeared 48 years earlier; because wormholes do not form naturally, NASA concludes that someone placed it there.

In Interstellar, what name does the crew give the giant black hole beyond the wormhole?

Gargantua was rendered from real relativity equations, and the work yielded new insights into how black holes bend light, published in a physics journal.

Which theoretical physicist and later Nobel laureate helped conceive Interstellar and served as its executive producer?

Kip Thorne argued Nolan out of letting a character travel faster than light; the director says the physicist kept explaining it was impossible until he conceded.

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

Anne Hathaway kept filming in frigid water after her suit sprang a leak, then asked what the symptoms of hypothermia were.

Which actress plays the adult Murph, Cooper's scientist daughter, in Interstellar?

Jessica Chastain's Murph records a message on the birthday that makes her the age Cooper was when he left, telling him it would be a really good time to come back.

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

Michael Caine's Professor Brand confesses to Murph on his deathbed that he lied: Plan A, saving the people already on Earth, was never possible.

Who voices and puppeteers the robot TARS in Interstellar?

Bill Irwin, a stage comic, moved the block-shaped robot around the set himself on a specially built rig, so TARS was physically there with the actors; Josh Stewart voiced its companion CASE.

Which actor plays Dr. Mann, the scientist found stranded on an ice planet in Interstellar?

Matt Damon's Dr. Mann turns out to have faked his planet's promising data so that someone would come and rescue him, and he then tries to kill Cooper.

How does Dr. Mann die in Interstellar?

An airlock decompression while docking kills him: Mann opens the hatch on an imperfect seal, and the blast sends the Endurance spinning, forcing Cooper's 'It's necessary' docking.

In Interstellar, each hour on Miller's planet costs roughly how many years back on Earth?

Seven years per hour means the crew's short stop costs them 23 years, and Cooper comes back to a backlog of video messages from children who have grown up without him.

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

A colossal tsunami: what look like distant mountains are waves, and the one that hits kills a crew member and floods the engines, stranding the crew while time races by on Earth.

Why does Interstellar's ring-shaped Endurance spin?

Artificial gravity: once the crew is aboard, the ring spins up to one G, and the motion leaves one of the scientists needing motion-sickness pills.

What crop is Cooper growing on his farm when Interstellar opens?

Corn: designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of it for the film to wreck in a dust storm, and Nolan says so much survived that the production made money on the crop.

Which composer wrote the score for Interstellar?

Hans Zimmer was given no script, only a one-page letter about a father leaving his child for an important job, and one day to write music for it. Nolan said that piece gave him the heart of the movie.

Which instrument dominates the score of Interstellar?

A pipe organ: the composer chose the 1926 instrument in London's Temple Church, saying its pipes look like spaceship afterburners and that you can hear the giant machine breathe.

Interstellar won its only Academy Award in which category?

Best Visual Effects was its one win from five nominations: to draw the black hole, the effects team wrote new rendering software from a physicist's equations.

Which Disney film beat Interstellar to number one on their shared US opening weekend?

Big Hero 6 won the weekend with $56.2 million to Interstellar's $47.5 million, even though Interstellar had led on the day they both opened wide.

Interstellar's scenes on Dr. Mann's frozen planet were shot on a glacier in which country?

Iceland: recent volcanic eruptions had streaked the chosen glacier with grey ash, giving Mann's frozen planet a marbled look the designers could not have planned.

Interstellar's farmhouse was built with mountains on the horizon in which Canadian province?

Alberta: Nolan wanted mountains behind the farm, so the crew built the house from scratch outside Calgary and brought in huge fans to blow its dust storms.

Cinemas using which format got Interstellar two days early?

Film prints: cinemas that could still run 35mm or 70mm got it two days early, a win for Nolan's campaign to keep film alive after most had switched to digital.

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

Steven Spielberg was set to direct from Jonathan Nolan's script, and when Spielberg left, the job passed to the writer's brother Christopher.

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

A tesseract: Cooper works out that the beings who built it are not aliens at all but humans from the far future, reaching back to save their own ancestors.

In Interstellar, young Murph believes a 'ghost' is trying to reach her through what?

Her bookshelf: books keep dropping from it, and the ghost pushing them out turns out to be her own father, reaching back to her from years in the future.

In Interstellar, how does Cooper send the black hole's quantum data to Murph?

Ticks of a watch's second hand: Cooper taps the data out in Morse code on the watch he gave Murph before he left, and years later she notices the hand twitching.

Which poem does Interstellar's Professor Brand recite?

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: Dylan Thomas's poem urges a fight against death, yet the professor reciting it already knows the people left on Earth cannot be saved.

In Interstellar's final scenes, how does the rebuilt TARS respond to a 75 percent humor setting?

It fakes a self-destruct countdown, so Cooper hastily drops the setting to 60 percent, and TARS answers that with 'Knock, knock.'

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

Whatever can happen will happen: Cooper says it to comfort young Murph, who has asked why her parents named her after something bad.

Which two words complete Cooper's Interstellar line "Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to…"?

'Die here': Cooper says it to his father-in-law Donald, arguing that the world is a treasure but has been telling them to leave for a while.

In Interstellar, what does Amelia Brand call the one thing we can perceive that transcends time and space?

Love: Brand says it to argue for Edmunds' planet, where the man she loves had landed. Cooper overrules her, and hers turns out to be the world where the colony is founded.

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

Hoyte van Hoytema, who had shot Her and Let the Right One In, got the job because Wally Pfister had left to direct a film of his own, Transcendence.

Which documentary supplied the elderly survivors' interviews that open Interstellar?

Ken Burns's The Dust Bowl: Nolan asked Burns for permission to reuse its real 1930s survivors, whose memories play in the film as if they were recalling its future blight.

Instead of green screen, what did Nolan put outside the spacecraft windows while filming Interstellar?

Projections of the finished effects: the space imagery was made before the shoot and thrown onto huge screens around the set, so an actor told to look at a black hole really saw one.

What did Interstellar's crew build to film its spacecraft flying through space?

Huge physical miniatures: Nolan felt real models gave the ships a presence that computer graphics could not, and they were built so large that the crew nicknamed them 'maxatures'.

What complaint about Interstellar's sound led some cinemas to post notices?

Dialogue was drowned out by music, so one New York multiplex put up signs saying its equipment was working properly and the film sounded the way Nolan intended.

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

Paramount Pictures had Interstellar first, and Warner Bros., which had released Nolan's Batman films, reportedly traded away rights in other films for a stake.

What does Interstellar's Endurance carry for Plan B?

Human embryos, some 5,000 of them on ice: Plan B would raise a new colony from scratch on another world and leave everyone still on Earth to die.

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

Casey Affleck's Tom keeps recording video messages for his absent father, who then watches him marry, lose a first son and finally say goodbye in a single sitting.

Which Endurance scientist stays aboard and grows old waiting while his crewmates visit the water planet in Interstellar?

Romilly stays behind to study the black hole, and the short trip his crewmates make to the surface costs him more than two decades, leaving him grey-bearded when they return.

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

John Lithgow's Donald tells Cooper that he is the one who doesn't belong in this world, born forty years too late or forty years too early.

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

Double Negative had to write a completely new renderer for the job, because light passing a black hole bends instead of travelling in the straight lines its software assumed.

In Interstellar, the earlier one-way scouting missions to the candidate planets were named after which biblical figure?

Lazarus: when Cooper calls the name cheerful, he is reminded that Lazarus came back from the dead, and he answers that Lazarus had to die in the first place.

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

On a huge space station: it is called Cooper Station, and when he says it was nice of them to name it after him, he is told it is named after his daughter.

Which famous astronomer set up the blind date between the producer and the physicist who later conceived Interstellar?

Carl Sagan's blind date began a long collaboration: the pair later worked on the film of his novel Contact, then wrote the treatment that became Interstellar.

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

Timothée Chalamet's Tom is steered into farming by a school that says his test score rules out college, a verdict that infuriates his father.

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

Ellen Burstyn's Murph, now an old woman while her father has barely aged, tells him from her deathbed not to stay and watch her die but to go and find Brand.

Which 'useless machine' does Interstellar's Cooper say his wife's doctors needed?

MRI scanner: with one, Cooper says, doctors would have found the cyst in his wife's brain before she died instead of afterwards, his retort to a teacher who has just called rockets useless machines.

Warner Bros. reportedly gave up its rights in which horror franchise to buy into Interstellar?

Friday the 13th: Warner Bros. reportedly also threw in its share of a future South Park movie, so keen was it to join a Nolan film set up at a rival studio.

Which film did Nolan screen for his crew before shooting Interstellar?

The Right Stuff: Nolan had the crew study how the 1983 astronaut drama had handled reflections in visors.

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

KIPP did most of the scouting on Mann's frozen planet until Mann dismantled it and booby-trapped its memory, which held the data that gave his lie away.

Why does Cooper drop his craft into the black hole late in Interstellar?

To shed weight so Brand escapes: he cites Newton's third law, saying the only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind.

Interstellar's production designer based the Endurance on which real spacecraft?

The International Space Station: designer Nathan Crowley wanted a ship patched together from real, tangible hardware, 'like a submarine in space' where every inch has a purpose.

In Interstellar, the drone Cooper captures comes from which country?

India: the drone has been flying on its own for ten years, and Cooper brings it down for solar cells that he says could power an entire farm.

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

George R. R. Martin wrote it while listing his Hugo Award picks, saying he would nominate Interstellar as the best film of its year ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Which private rocket company did Nolan visit while researching Interstellar?

SpaceX: Nolan said space travel stopped being an abstraction for him once he walked in and found people actually building rockets.

In Interstellar, the family is watching which sport when a huge dust storm rolls in?

Baseball: Cooper remarks that when he was a boy people were too busy fighting over food to play it, and the family has to leave the game as the wall of dust arrives.

What shape is the wormhole in Interstellar?

A sphere: a crew member explains that a hole drawn as a circle in two dimensions becomes a ball in three, and the effects team's version looked like a crystal ball reflecting the universe.