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Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar originally began as a Steven Spielberg project
After The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's brother went to work with Steven Spielberg and came back with the core of what would become Interstellar
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Christopher Nolan’s career includes some of the most unique blockbusters in recent history, with Interstellar being one of the most iconic. But the film wasn’t originally pitched to Christopher Nolan; it was originally workshopped by his brother Jonathan Nolan and none other than Steven Spielberg. As Christopher Nolan recently told actor Timothée Chalamet, Interstellar had a slightly unusual path toward the big screen.
“Right after we collaborated on Dark Knight, my brother got the job and went to work with Steven [Spielberg],” Christopher Nolan explained during a recent public appearance with Timothée Chalamet, who played the younger version of Tom Cooper in Interstellar. “He worked on it for a lot of years. It had incredible ideas and moved through all these different iterations, but until Steven was ready to make it, whatever it is, it never quite got that momentum.”
Steven Spielberg has never been one to sit idle for long, so other projects took precedence over the movie that would eventually become Interstellar. “Steven went off to do another film,” Christopher Nolan continued. “So it became available… I had a lot of conversations with Jonathan over the years and what he was doing and what his ambition was. I was excited by it. I was incredibly struck by his first act. I had been working on a time travel idea… things looking at time. I had half-baked projects that I hadn’t committed to. When it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, ‘How would you feel if I took this and tried to combine it with some of my ideas and change a bit with what it was?’ He was fine with it. He could tell the spirit of what I was trying to do was to get what he was initially excited about it.”
Turns out even Steven Spielberg’s discarded projects can become massive hits in the hands of Christopher Nolan.
Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+. Spielberg's next excursion into science fiction, Disclosure Day, will be released in theaters June 12.
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