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Exclusive Interview With Jonathan Nolan On Interstellar

Jonathan Nolan is one of the most in-demand screenwriters in Hollywood today. His first four screenplays, which he co-wrote with brother Christopher Nolan, are among the top #100 most-loved films according to the Internet Movie Database. (The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and, now, Interstellar.) You could even count a fifth title in that grouping if you include his story credit for Memento, for which he received an Oscar nomination.

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With a story about a ravaged planet having to look for new habitation elsewhere, the obvious cause to move away today would be to avoid the disastrous effects of climate change. How did the Dust Bowl-inspired “Blight” end up as the launching pad instead?

Jonathan Nolan: In thinking about the future – and I spent a lot of time thinking about the future in writing this film – you think a lot about the past and the past’s perception of what the future is going to be like. I wanted a jet pack, but we got Instagram. [Laughs] Kind of a raw deal, but the future is never quite what you imagine it’s going to be. Right now, we’re all focused in on climate change. I think that’s absolutely appropriate and we should be doing everything we can.

There were concerns about the Ozone layer and there were concerns when I was a kid about the population bomb. We’ve always found a different way of focusing on it. All of those problems are connected to each other, right. We do tend to refocus on the question every few decades. I think the feeling we were really trying to get at was to recognize that there are simply so many things that could extinguish life on Earth and it’s probably not going to be the thing we thought it was.

The problem with living on one planet in one solar system… inevitably, we’re going to perish, if we don’t spread beyond this planet. I spent a memorable afternoon with Kip [Thorne] and a bunch of biologists and astrobiologists talking about all the many different ways that human life can be extinguished at CalTech one day. It was truly sobering. We’d vanish without a trace if we’re not careful, and it might be a slight increase in solar radiation, it could be an asteroid, it could be the bacteria here on earth. Or, in the case in this film as we presented it, we wanted something that was familiar but not necessarily expected: the Blight.

Look at the potato famine and the events of those handful of years in Ireland in the 19th century, and then all the blights that are kind of invisible to us right now. The bananas that we eat right now are different than the bananas that we ate growing up as kids and different again from the ones that our parents ate as kids. Because of the way that we factory farm, it encourages the growth of blights that quickly become more efficient at eating our food than we are.

The idea of a total blight is a reach but not unimaginable. The environmental impact that that would have, the Dust Bowl – which is something that Chris added, building off the logic of a blight – those effects are catastrophic and they’re within living memory. The Dust Bowl is one of these events that is beautifully immortalized in Ken Burns’ documentary [from 2012] from which some of those clips [seen at the beginning of Interstellar] are taken from. It was one of Chris’s flourishes, a brilliant one, and Ken was kind enough to work with the film on that level.

The Dust Bowl has been forgotten by so many. It’s so hard for us to conceive of how destructive and apocalyptic that was. Chris actually had to [tone it] down a little bit. The imagery, the things described by survivors of the Dust Bowl seemed too outlandish and too massive for an audience to even believe. But these were real events… to Americans in the previous century, in living memory. It felt like a great foundation for us to think about the ways in which human life can be extinguished that might come out of nowhere.

Interstellar deals with a fantastic voyage and now there is the Mars One concept for the next decade to take a group of human beings and let them establish a colony on Mars. Many in the scientific community are saying it’s technically unfeasible and an enormous risk to those who end up going. What are your thoughts about this ambitious venture?

Jonathan Nolan: I’m not familiar with the details of [Mars One] but I’m much more familiar with Elon Musk’s stated goals of getting to Mars and the technical capacity for getting there. I think regardless of the group who’s backing it, I think it’s extremely important. Part of the reason I got this job is I came in and talked to Spielberg about this project he was developing about a current-day, interstellar space exploration. And I said to him, “Here’s the realistic version. It’s 10 minutes long, it doesn’t happen, because the money’s all tied up in budget appropriation and bullshit and we’re not going.”

That was a more cynical moment and that was almost 10 years ago. 10 years ago, at that moment, it felt like it was not going to happen. It felt like speech making. Now it feels like there’s a viable model, a partnership potentially between private and public moneys – NASA in partnership with other people – to establish a beachhead elsewhere in the solar system.

At the end of several years of working on this project, it feels extremely important to me that we continue a robust program of space exploration and colonization. As goofy as it sounds – and it sounds like a science-fiction movie, right – it sounded goofy that we would ever put people on the moon. It would be sad to think that the only reason we were able to accomplish that was because we were in direct competition with the Soviet Union. We’re not in a Cold War anymore. Can we do this of our own initiative? Can we do this not because it’s a pissing contest with the Russians, but because the global community decides that this is scientifically valuable, and frankly, also potentially a matter of survival?

That concludes our interview, but we would like to thank Jonathan Nolan very much for speaking with us. Be sure to pick up Interstellar as it’s now available on Blu-Ray.