Interstellar: When Christopher Nolan Revealed This Ken Burns Documentary Inspired Matthew McConaughey-Anne Hathaway Starrer’s Script
Interstellar has been re-released all over India, and fans are going gaga over it! But do you know what inspired Christopher Nolan to make the script of such a sci-fi classic?
What Inspired Christopher Nolan To Make Interstellar? ( Photo Credit – Instagram )
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Christopher Nolan is the director and co-writer of the movie Interstellar, which was released in 2014. Ten years later, in 2025, the film once again found a spot in the theatres and has been re-released across India and several other countries in the world. People are still going to the theatres and watching it like they are devouring for the first time. That’s the power Nolan’s creations hold. Featuring a stellar star cast, including Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Timothee Chalamet, Matt Damon, Michael Caine, and others – it’s a story about space and a beautiful tale involving a father and a daughter, a story
The plot follows Joseph Cooper (Matthew), a farmer and ex-NASA pilot tasked with flying a spacecraft along with a few researchers to find a new planet for humans as Earth slowly slips into destruction. While the cast gave their best performance, did you know Nolan took inspiration from Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl for the script and visuals of Interstellar? Yes, that’s right. Read ahead to know more about it.
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When Christopher Nolan appeared on The Colbert Report, he shared a few details about his film Interstellar. In the interview, he spoke about how Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl inspired the early moments he created on Earth when massive dust storms attacked the protagonists, leaving them devastated. But did you know the interview clips shown at the film’s beginning, where people looked back on the blights that affected Earth’s crops, were original and real-life footage? Those scenes were taken from Burns’ documentary.
Talking about it, Nolan said, “Those are real people. We drew it from Ken Burns’ documentary on the Dust Bowl, which he very kindly let me use some excerpts from because even though it’s a science fiction film, I wanted the feeling of dread, the feeling of imbalance between the human race and the planet to be real and credible.” Christopher Nolan wrote the screenplay based on a previous draft by his brother, Jonathan Nolan.
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In another interview, the director explained how the script of Interstellar was conceived during a conversation with Jonathan. He said, “Jonathan was working on it for Steven Spielberg at the time, but we always bounce ideas off each other, and it just sounded incredibly exciting. What it was that got me was the way Jonah originally explained it to me, that it’s really about an inevitability. We’re going to leave this planet at some point further than we have, we’re going to go beyond the moon, we’re going to go to Mars. So there’s an inevitability to human evolution, this being the next step. That seemed like a massive thing that hadn’t been addressed in movies, and that’s the kind of opportunity you’re looking for.”
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Well, that’s how a classic was made, and I would always be a fan of Interstellar. What about you?
