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JG Walter Donohue [Editor at Faber & Faber] wanted me to start off with a question about the term science fiction. He’s never liked the term science fiction; he prefers the term speculative fiction. He believes speculating about the future is a way of revealing the way we live now and providing some kind of order in the way of understanding the chaos of contemporary life.
JN For me, that was the whole jumping off point. Originally, Steven Spielberg wanted to do a contemporary space adventure. I pitched him instead something set fifty years into the future. The reason was that – in the tradition of MASH being set in the Korean War but really being about the Vietnam War – I wanted to do something that reflected what I thought was the current state of human ambition. Which it is to say we congratulate ourselves every day on living in this spectacular moment of technological advancement and progress; we’ve invented the inter net and a variety of ways we can buy stuff online, but we’re not going into space. Measured purely by altitude, the human race peaked fifty years ago.

CN There are several key narrative ideas that I put into the script based on passages that Kip had led me to in his book. Those then turned out to be the things that he argued with me the most about whether they would really happen.
Laughter.
But I found that fascinating because it meant to me that even though he’d written it in a book ten years ago, he was still completely prepared to take it as a fresh story element, and argue about whether or not it could really be.
JN Sure.
CN And I found that surprising and a little frustrating at first, and then the more I talked to him I realized that he approaches these things from a very pure point of view. So it’s not about whether he said it ten years ago or not, it’s about what does he believe now. What does the science tell him. And very often it was about whether he could make the numbers work. Literally. So I would say, ‘Can this happen?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll do some calculations.’ And when he did the calculations it allowed him to understand that mathematically it was possible, which I guess is kind of the genesis of the whole idea of wormholes because he doesn’t believe they can be naturally occurring, but he believes them as a mathematical possibility based on Einstein’s equations. But I did find that when I came to the project, there was a very, very dense amount of science that he was quite keen on that I had to (laughs) gently pry him away from.
JN (laughs) Yeah, sure.

CN And we were able to address some very sophisticated scientific concepts in the movie by just simplifying – just having fewer elements. I think there were so many things crammed into the original, so many scientific ideas that Kip wanted or that you wanted –
JN Yeah, there was an awful lot of stuff that we were trying to cover. Kind of everything … Well, the film’s called Interstellar!
Laughter.
CN Relative to the original question, though, I definitely tried to not go too far and try to understand the complexities of science because I felt that the audience won’t be able to. I have to understand it a little bit better than the audience does, but you have to be one of them …

JN You and I are not terribly keen on research. You do just enough so that you see the possibilities and not the constraints. This was a very different experience for me because I spent so long talking with Kip and reading books. Sometimes these projects go quickly, sometimes they drag on, but this one lasted a bit. I became friends with Kip – we sort of kept talking – and I think all of that helps. There was about a two-month period in 2008 in which I felt confident to say that I felt like I truly understood both special relativity and the theory of general relativity, right? And then the writers’ strike happened and I’ve never understood it since. (Laughs.) Some of these things you can understand on an intellectual level, and then hanging out with Kip long enough there are some of these things that you just start to feel are more instinctual.
CN And the instinctual ones are the worthwhile ones because the actual ones don’t play for an audience at all, unless they can be summarized as a simple rule that you oppose – like you can’t go faster than the speed of light, or whatever.

JG Explain the significance of Murphy’s Law.
JN Murphy’s Law is not quite as scientific as – (To CN.) I can’t remember if you and I ever talked about it …
CN Well, the way you explain it in the draft – it actually is pretty scientific, funnily enough.
JN Yeah, it’s kind of a lot of my speculative bullshit. What was interesting about Murphy’s Law was that I thought it was a fascinating jumping-off point for a theme –
CN Well, it’s not speculative bullshit! You mean in terms of it meaning whatever can happen, will happen?
JN No, that’s not speculative bullshit.
CN The other end of it is complete bullshit, and Kip has explained that to me. I left it in the film because I thought it was really good.

JN What’s that?
CN The scientific idea that Brand expounds that because Miller’s and Mann’s planets orbit a black hole that not enough elements are able to reach them. Kip went with it at first, but then he talked to some of his colleagues, and he’s fairly confident that, in fact, the opposite would be true. But he was okay with me leaving it there because I’m like, ‘Well, first off, she could be wrong.’ And I think, interestingly for Kip, that was a major breakthrough because of his understanding of the science –
JN (laughing) That the scientist could be wrong! Yeah, totally.
CN Yeah, that you can have a character who spouts bullshit, or speculation, or whatever – that that’s okay. Once he got his head around it, he was very comfortable with it. Where we got into a certain amount of trouble and where we really tried to skirt the truth is with the gravitational pull of the black hole, because this orbital angular momentum stuff that it gets into, the way that a black hole would really attract a body, and the way that you wouldn’t fall into it, you would orbit it – they’re just not things that the audience is ever going to be able to understand. That was one of those early things that we said, ‘The way this story is going to work, we’re going to have to view gravity as a stronger force than it really is.’ Or, stronger in its early stages.

JN But in turn, when you’d talk to Kip you’d realize that relativity is such an odd thing. The shape of our universe is so bizarre that at certain speeds and locations, time and space do become very unusual. The idea that I was really trying to get to with Murphy’s Law was just that we live in a space in which things are permitted to happen, right? And those are good things or bad things. Death, destruction, but also life. The idea that we’re here on this ball of mud hurtling through space seems to have something to do with our interactions with extra-planetary bodies and cosmic rings –
CN I think biologically and historically it’s a very interesting idea, and I do think it’s scientific because it actually relates to osmosis, as simply as that; it’s like, a body in motion with particles going through a membrane because they just will.
JN Right. They’ll find a way.
CN Exactly.

JG Talk about making abstract, complex concepts understandable by finding a way to make them emotional.
CN You do have to personalize it. Even if the audience understands it, they aren’t going to care about it. There were two things that really hooked me on the project after reading the early drafts. I mean, I loved the characters. I loved the setting of the first act. But I really loved the moment where Cooper catches up with the messages he’s missed. And I always felt that if you could make that the center piece of everything that happens in the second act – it just is such a powerful thing that anyone could relate to. And there is science behind it, but you’re not thinking about the science at all. You’re actually thinking about your own mortality. You’re thinking about living life as a human being. And that was attractive to me.
If you look at what I did with the draft, mostly what I did was take out all of the other stuff in the second act and just have that scene. I always found that moment to be the most ambitious thing in the project, and the most sort of … extraordinary.

JG Walter brought up an interesting point. He said that Flannery O’Connor always said that the most important word when writing is concrete. And for him the concrete thing in this script was the emotional core between the parent and the children.
CN Yeah. Well, I always felt that was at the heart of the project. My feeling on the development process – which you (JN) were engaged in for many years – is that it doesn’t necessarily allow for choices; that is to say, the stripping down of choices. The development process inherently adds things – adds potential choices – but it’s not a very good process for making the ultimate choices you have to make in terms of what to take out. And ultimately, in any moviemaking process, at some stage somebody has to come along – usually it winds up being a director, if somebody’s a writer-director they’ve got a better chance of doing it – and going, ‘Okay, yes you could make this whole other movie. You could make ten other movies, but you can’t make those movies. You’ve got to choose one and follow that line very strongly.’ So what I found in your drafts was this family. And to me, that’s the thing that you follow the whole way. And ultimately what I wound up doing – and I told you after I’d done it because I did not do it on purpose – but I wound up eliminating any kind of alien life from the project. For me, that happened for two reasons. I mean, one was just me following my natural instinct about what I loved about the characters, and the story that I thought was important. The other reason has to do with the problems I have with a lot of popular science fiction films over the years, which is that they don’t necessarily focus in on a momentous event to the degree that they should, and the only way to do that is with the exclusion of other momentous events.

JN Sure.
CN So, to me the idea that you could find a planet that you could walk around on and talk about living on is so extreme, that to then also have a scene where somebody encounters alien life – that to me is the next momentous event …
JN A whole other movie!
CN It’s the difference between screenplays and then the screenplay that you go, ‘Okay now we turn the cameras over on Monday.’ It’s not about taking out things that you think are good – it’s just about a choice of going, ‘You could make any movie out of this. What is it?’ And I talked to you a lot, I remember, about genre very inarticulately for a very long period of time. Like years. Because I would say I don’t want it to be an adventure story, but it was very difficult to figure out. I think ultimately it was about moving away from it being an action film and going more to – I don’t even know what genre you call, like, Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Greed, or these films that are very much about human beings, and they tend to be quite simple stories.
JN A disaster morality tale, or something. Something in that space.
CN Yeah, I suppose you do call them adventure movies, but it’s different. It’s different from action-adventure.
JN Absolutely. Because Interstellar isn’t about an antagonist. The antagonist is the universe.
CN Exactly.

JN The antagonist is the void of the vacuum that we live in.
CN Yeah. Which is about focus. I mean, one of the things that we did very early on – well, we really did it in the shooting, but when we came to edit, we do the first docking scene on the Endurance, which in all the scripts had been fairly much a throwaway. In my draft, it was one line. But the action takes up a lot of screen time. And I think, without even really talking about it with Lee (Lee Smith, Editor), we realized that if you make that moment important, and difficult, and dangerous, you’re setting the tone in terms of just how difficult space is. If you turn the volume down you can put the focus on the mechanics of ‘how do you live in space?’ One of the things we talked a lot about in the sound design is not having sound effects in space. We thought that was going to be this very risky and daring thing to do, but what we discovered was that as soon as you just did it and looked at the film that way, you realized that silence is extremely threatening. It really reminds you at every stage that you just shouldn’t be there.
JN You’re automatically reminded of the uninhabitable aspect of that environment. It’s very powerful.
JG By no means is this a message film, but it does emphasize the importance of the human impulse to explore, and it hits it pretty hard, particularly in the first act.

CN Well, I think that’s a very positive message to have in the first act because it keeps an optimism to things, even though there’s a negative view of ‘where are we now?’ But there’s a real optimism to exploration. It’s like in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker sitting there on Tatooine trying to see what’s out there and eventually he gets his chance. So, it’s an incredibly optimistic thing at the beginning of the film. What I brought to it, which actually wasn’t even that fresh an idea because it was something which you talked about years before trying to get it in yourself, was the idea of looping it back in on itself. So the journey returns to where it starts. Because that always seemed the appropriate journey, and I think I tried very hard to make that very literal – very mechanical almost. We loop it back in on itself, and we see the dangers of that kind of exploration. I don’t just mean physic ally, but emotionally. I mean, you go all the way out there, and then you have to come back.
JN But you return to find the world has changed. That was the most important thing for me. I think where I began my journey with this film was really with the end. The idea of a man out of his own time. Sort of a time traveller. On some instinctual level we feel that time travel is not possible backwards. The universe forbids it. You feel that once events move from right to left and we progress forwards in time, there’s no going back. And there’s something very tragic and sad about that. You can move only in the tragic direction – tragic in the sense that you have to leave people behind, optimistic in the sense that you can glimpse the future.
CN Right.

JN And as you get older, and certainly as I’ve become a parent, which is this transformative moment and somewhat meaningful for me with this project, because when I started it the relationships between what was then father and son were purely speculative – Chris then changed Murph to a little girl, and then in the interim I had a little girl of my own. So now the emotional wallop of the film is completely different. But even in the short few months since I’ve become a parent, you begin to realize that, as you get older, you become a bit of a passenger in the universe. And I imagine I will probably get to a moment in my life shortly towards the end of it where you just want to keep living because you want to see what happens. What do our children become? What is my little girl going to be doing in forty or fifty years? I mean, the possibilities of that are staggering. And the idea – a very provocative one – that you’d be able to glimpse that on some level, that you’d be able to glimpse where all that is going, is very sad and very alluring all at once.

CN It is, but there’s another factor that really feeds into that, which is that pop culture relentlessly speculates about the negative aspects of the continuing human story. So there are all these ideas of apocalyptic thinking. Every generation believes they’re the last generation on Earth. Maybe one generation will eventually be right. I certainly hope it’s not ours. But everyone has always believed that, so there has always been this apocalyptic mode to storytelling. What I really loved about what you’d done with the central concept is that it transcends that. It’s about the way in which human beings adapt and transcend natural movements – apocalyptic-type movements. And that is where the optimism comes in. That’s also where the excitement comes in. Yes, the sadness of leaving Earth is very analogous to the sadness of leaving home. But then you go somewhere and that’s exciting and fascinating. I was just struck by how it had been a long time since I saw movies like the ones that Spielberg was making in the early eighties, late seventies, where you presented a sort of inevitability in life or human evolution or whatever – something that the filmmakers really believed in. Like, if you look at Close Encounters or E.T., or whatever – stuff where you go, ‘Okay, these things are going to happen. What if it happened now? Or what if we could see it happening now? What if we knew it?’ And I just thought that original concept you had that the Earth is the nest and you leave the nest – I’d never seen that presented as positive. I’d never seen that presented as a simple, evolutionary sort of inevitability. Which, to me, the best science fiction films do, or the best speculative fiction films do – they present it as, ‘Yes, this is going to happen. Isn’t it interesting to think about what that would be like?’ It’s actually a lot harder to imagine something positive – a lot harder to imagine what if we have to go beyond where we are?
JN That’s the fascinating question of why is it that humans are so obsessed with not just the idea of their own Armageddon, but their own culpability in it.

CN Well, I think it’s actually easier to imagine hell than it is to imagine heaven, and I think if you look at paintings or anything else, the descriptions of hell are always more convincing and relatable because they’re exaggerations of human suffering, which is quite tactile. But there’s also massive importance to a generation that is the last human generation. I think every generation has that sort of ego to them – if you could ascribe an ego to an entire species. But there’s that idea that we might be the last, and therefore we are the most important.
JN The film might be guilty of that, but ultimately not.
CN I don’t think it is at all because there’s nobody sitting there going, ‘Yeah, we messed up; this is the end of things.’ They’re all sitting there kind of going, ‘Yeah, we’ll figure it out.’ Part of the problem of where the negativity comes from has happened in the last twenty years with people trying to look in a more cynical way under the surface about motivations for why things happen. So, there’s a very, very powerful belief that innovation comes from war, or human conflict. You know, we only went into space to mess with the Russians or whatever it is. And you go, ‘Okay. There are interesting theories behind that. There are interesting undercurrents that, yes, in the past, might have been overlooked.’ But now people aren’t seeing the wood for the trees. We went to space because it was a cool thing to do. Kennedy sat there and said, ‘Yeah. We should go to the moon.’ I had a very interesting conversation with my friend David Lloyd years ago. We were talking about, in human history who of our times will be remembered? And who will be the most prominent person to be remembered for the last hundred years in the way that historical figures are? And if you ask people that question, you know, they’ll say things like Steve Jobs, or whatever. And then you go, no, it’s Neil Armstrong!

JN Right.
CN And how can it not be Neil Armstrong? If you look five hundred years in the future, it’s like, the first guy who left the earth and landed somewhere else.
JN He’s Christopher Columbus minus all the slavery.
CN Yes. And whatever things sort of hover around, that stop us from being able to see, will fall away over time, the same way they did for Columbus.
JN And that’s how I got the job in the first place. At that moment it absolutely felt – this was my pitch – that the safe bet was in a million years that alien anthropologists would come to Earth and they would find a stick with a piece of polyester on the moon, and they would say, ‘Wow, they almost made it. They got that far.’ So, you wash away all the day-to-day stuff that we get caught up in – this invention or that invention. And it’s like, ‘No.’ That drive to get out, to explore the universe, will be the residue that’s left behind. Armstrong will be the person that people talk about.

This is what connects it back, for me, to Murphy’s Law. Murphy’s Law popularly is: if something could go wrong, it will go wrong. The eponymous Murphy was one of a group of rocket engineers working for the Air Force. And he was a grumpy guy, and the rest of the people on the team didn’t like him very much because he was constantly ragging on people. And one day he came back and said, ‘You know, if there was a way for these guys to mess this up, they would.’ And that has been how we remember Murphy’s Law, right? If there’s a way for human beings to mess things up, they will. But another guy there – an engineer by the name of Nichols – had a different take on it. And by his accounting, the sentiment – as it was expressed as they were distilling this wisdom of the things going wrong in their testing – was that ‘If something can happen, it will happen.’ It doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it doesn’t have to be a good thing. Humans are capable of both. We’re lucky enough to live in a universe in which both things can happen. And it’s interesting to see how many films and books tend to concentrate on all the terrible things that we can do. The parasitic relationship between innovation and violence and all those sorts of things. And there’s something under it, certainly. But they do tend to ignore the self-evident part too.
CN Yeah, exactly.
JN We exist. We survived. Hopefully, we will continue to survive, and that is probably a good thing.

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