With months still to go before his latest, sci-fi adventure **Interstellar **flies into cinemas, Christopher Nolan is naturally being guarded about what we can expect. Even during a luncheon set up at this year’s CinemaCon to celebrate the man and his work, he managed to tease more than reveal when prompted to talk up the Matthew McConaughey-starring film.
He was, however, effusive in his praise for his leading man, who he has caught at the perfect moment of his career. McConaughey, coming off an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club and praise for several roles on big and small screens, caught Nolan’s eye in Mud, which proved to the hard-to-please director that McConaughey had developed some real dramatic chops.
"I needed someone who is very much an everyman, someone the audience could experience the story with,” Nolan said. “He's just a phenomenal, charismatic presence in the movie. His performance is shaping up to be extraordinary."
McConaughey and a cast that includes a blend of Nolan veterans and some new faces in Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Casey Affleck, David Oyelowo and Wes Bentley, benefitted from the Dark Knight director’s commitment to shooting real locations and making sure that they had fewer green screens to stare at than might be expected from a film set partially in space.
“We have spatial interiors…We built closed sets and shot it like a documentary, like they were really there," Nolan explained, adding that he pushed the effects team to speed up their research and design stage so giant monitors could display environments for the cast to see while performing.
Prodded by moderator Todd McCarthy, Nolan would really only confirm the film’s wormhole plot and that it’ll see the crew travelling to places that couldn’t be reached via normal speeds thanks to time limitations. He admitted that the film – which blends Jonah Nolan’s work on astrophysicist Kip Thorn’s pitch about the space phenomena with some ideas of Chris’ own – is partly inspired by his own youth seeing such cinematic landmarks as Star Wars and 2001.
From the sounds of it, we’re in for something on a huge canvas, and very different from anything Nolan has worked on before. Expect the unexpected, then, when **Interstellar **arrives on November 7.
Did Interstellar leave you baffled and confused? We explain Interstellar in detail here.