“It could well be that the agents of our destruction are moments away,” Jonathan Nolan told BuzzFeed News.
Paramount Pictures
Writer Jonathan Nolan sat on a couch in a room in a fancy Beverly Hills hotel. The man in the elegantly beige Four Seasons suite, who along with his brother, director Christopher Nolan (Inception), wrote the space film Interstellar, was more than 10 stories off the ground, but ideally, he would have been considerably higher.
"The first time I was having an argument with someone about space exploration," Nolan told BuzzFeed News, "this person's opinion was, Why the fuck are we wasting all this money going to space when there's still starving people? And as a kid, that blew my fucking mind. Why do those things have to be in conflict with each other? Space is cool, and feeding people is cool. Why can't you do both?"
In Nolan's movie — which opens in wide release Nov. 7 — the answer is you can't: Earth is suffering a generalized blight, and the only options are starvation or a desperate escape to space. The main character, an astronaut named Cooper played with a cowboy's appeal by Matthew McConaughey, is chosen to lead a team through a wormhole to a far-flung galaxy where they might find a planet that will be ideal for mankind. Just as James Fenimore Cooper imagined the wilderness as the inevitable site of American self-realization, so does this new Cooper see his own destiny written in the stars.
The themes of Interstellar resonate throughout Nolan's work: In his Batman installments The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, also co-written with his brother Christopher, the hero at the center is a fundamentally decent man bound by a code that he follows even if it leads him to do morally ambiguous things. Person of Interest, the crime show he created for CBS, revolves around a brilliant and mysterious billionaire bent on protecting ordinary citizens — viewers wrestle with his surveillance-reliant and often violent methods. What is the cost of the greater good? And what is standing between us and chaos?
Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) says goodbye to his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy).
Paramount Pictures
Cooper, too, is not an unquestioning explorer: Interstellar, comfortable in its nearly three-hour runtime with soliloquies on gravity and the nature of space-time, is asking a lot of its audience, Nolan said, so "it needed to be grounded in the human experience. It had to have a strong beating heart at the center of the narrative." That heart is the children that Cooper leaves behind on Earth, assuring them that he will come back. It's "one of the foundational ideas in literature, this idea of separation and return," said Nolan, citing Homer's Odyssey. Nolan recalled his own father traveling extensively for work, and wondering as a young boy when his father would come home. Humans are social, collective animals, he said, "but we're still isolated and kind of trapped within ourselves. … We're sort of trapped by our own ambitions and desires, goals." And so Cooper, trapped by his ambitions and desires, heads off in a spaceship to fulfill his cosmonaut dreams, not knowing how much of his children's lives he'll miss. On a small and personal scale, this stands in for the conflicts of modernity, the screenwriter said.
"In a very real way, our achievements are coupled directly to our disasters. No World War II? No Apollo space program." Nolan was referring to the development of V-2 rockets in Nazi Germany by Wernher von Braun, the man who would later become the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and an instrumental figure in the American "space race," which is to say that a former Nazi was one of NASA's first employees.
"That's the paradox at the center of the film, is the idea that humans are such fucked-up animals," he said, sipping a bottle of water from a military dictatorship in the South Pacific. "Our triumphs are rooted in our disasters — the two walk hand in hand. And I don't really have an answer for that. The film asks questions about that idea."
No comments:
Post a Comment