The new issue of **Empire **- November 2014, on sale now - is set almost entirely in the future. With Christopher Nolan's space odyssey **Interstellar **blazing a trail that's followed by all manner of other sci-fi delights (The Right Stuff, which is really sci-fact, and 2001: A Space Odyssey), the issue is like a endless wormhole of exclusive features and first-looks.
Our on-set access to Nolan's latest, however, is unquestionably the big issue centrepiece. Nowhere else on Earth can you find such comprehensive access to the** Interstellar**verse. To give a flavour of the piece, here's a short extract from our **Interstellar **feature...
*CHRISTOPHER NOLAN is flying a spaceship. Weighing 12 tons and mounted ten feet off the ground on a complex arrangement of pistons, this truck-sized, bevelled rectangle resembles the design sweet spot between The Dark Knight’s Tumbler, an Empire Strikes Back snowspeeder, a space shuttle and the submersible Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me. Empire stands a safe distance from the craft’s stern, which has at its centre a circular hatch (for docking, we’re told). Its angular nose is directed away from us, towards a smoke machine, an industrial fan and a huge, white curtain which hangs from the rafters of this Sony Pictures Studios sound stage (the same one that housed the Batcave). And hard-mounted on the spaceship’s top port side, like a noisy, boxy carbuncle, is an IMAX camera.
The fair-haired captain of this good ship, which he’s named the Ranger, stands a few metres to its right in jacket, waistcoat and sky-blue shirt. Flanked by his new director of photography, the Dutch-Swedish Hoyte Van Hoytema (long-haired, bearded, clad in gothblack), and his long-serving first assistant director Nilo Otero (who, with his neat sweep of silver hair, sharp suit and everpresent toothpick, could be a Mob-movie consigliere), Nolan positions himself behind a steampunkish control panel: three strips of copper bolted together in a triangle and rod-mounted on a stand.
“Okay, gimbal’s powering up... LET’S STAY CLEAR!” barks Otero, strutting the danger-zone perimeter. “GOING HOT ON THE GIMBAL!”*
Did Interstellar leave you baffled and confused? We explain Interstellar in detail here.