The untold story inside Spielberg’s ‘Interstellar’
The untold story inside Spielberg’s ‘Interstellar’ – Steven Spielberg wanted to make “Interstellar”: This is how different Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi genius would have been under his direction.
By Megan Sauer
What would “Interstellar” have looked like if Steven Spielberg had directed it instead of Chris Nolan?
You can read here that this question is not purely hypothetical, but that it actually almost came to this.
“ Interstellar ” is one of the best science fiction films of all time . Not only the story, but also the images, the sound, the atmosphere, the equipment and the actors are galactic in the truest sense. Most sci-fi fans can agree that Christopher Nolan did a great job. But the Brit almost didn’t get the chance. Because a completely different master director actually wanted to direct the future epic: Steven Spielberg.
In “Interstellar,” Earth is facing the apocalypse in the year 2067. Dust storms have devastated the planet and billions of people have already starved to death as a result. NASA boss Prof. John Brand ( Michael Caine ) contacts his ex-employee Joseph Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) to embark on what is probably the most important mission in history: he and his crew (including Anne Hathaway ) are supposed to go through a wormhole near Saturn fly and search for a new, livable planet for humanity…
Warning: The following paragraphs contain some massive spoilers for “Interstellar.” If you haven’t seen the film yet, it’s better to continue reading after you’ve enjoyed it.
In 2006, Steven Spielberg began developing the original idea for “Interstellar” into a film from producer Lynda Obst (“Contact”) and the respected theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.
In 2007 he commissioned Jonathan Nolan, who had previously written the scripts for his directorial works “ Memento ” and “ Prestige ” together with his brother Christopher, to write a screenplay.
At this point, Spielberg had every intention of directing the film himself. However, when his production company switched from Paramount to Disney soon afterwards, a new director had to be found for legal reasons.
Meanwhile, Spielberg began work on “ Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull .”
Jonathan Nolan recommended his brother to the studio for the now vacant job.
Shortly after Christopher Nolan was awarded the contract, he began to revise Jonathan’s script and supplement it with segments from his own script, initially intended for another film.
This is how an exciting and touching character drama combined with a visually and intellectually captivating exploration of space, the time-space continuum and various scientific theories took shape.
The end result of his efforts, presented to cinema fans in 2014, differs significantly from Spielberg’s original concept in many places.
This not only affects the plot and the characters moving in it, but also the mood, the pace and the emotional direction.
Like so many Western filmmakers these days, the mastermind behind “ Jaws ,” “ Schindler’s List ” and “ Jurassic Park ” was already looking towards the world’s largest film market, China, and also planned to incorporate a lot more classic action.
CHINA WOULD HAVE BEEN FASTER
The script Spielberg would have used called for China to initially outpace the United States in the race to save humanity in space.
This should be evident from the fact that the drone that Cooper and his kids ( Mackenzie Foy, Timothée Chalamet ) come across at the beginning is not an Indian manufacturer, but a Chinese one.
Later, Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand (Hathaway) arrive on the ice planet and discover that Chinese astronauts have been there decades before.
The duo also finds an underground bunker with Chinese robots and a mysterious box that generates artificial gravity.
As they attempt to take this box back to their spaceship, they are attacked by the robots and engaged in a fight.
In Spielberg’s “Interstellar”, the Chinese were supposed to discover all the answers to saving our species long before the NASA crew, but then tragically died on their return to Earth.
As the story progresses, a small black hole sucks in Brand and Cooper. Another wormhole then opens in it, sending them into a hyper dimension.
Here the two find out that the Chinese have built a gigantic space station…
ROMANCE AND SEX ON BOARD THE “ENDURANCE”?
In Nolan’s version, there is no forced romantic relationship between Cooper and Brand.
Their interaction is limited solely to professional cooperation and ultimately friendship. By not making her the “love interest” of the protagonist, Nolan gave Hathaway’s character a lot more weight.
In Spielberg’s version, however, it was intended that Cooper and Brand would enter into a romantic relationship during their mission with the “Endurance”, which would become the focus at the end of the film.
After watching the video logs of their family members, in which they believe they belong to the last generation of people on the planet, Cooper and Brand fall into each other’s arms for comfort and become intimate with each other.
When Cooper leaves Brand alone on the new planet at the end, he tries to save his mission partner not only out of collegial loyalty and scientific reasons, but because he is in love with her.
The romantic relationship would probably have taken some of the narrative power away from Cooper’s primary goal of ensuring the survival of his children.
THE END: DIFFERENT AND YET THE SAME
With Nolan, Cooper doesn’t make it back to Earth. Instead, he wakes up on the other side of the wormhole and finds that his now grown-up daughter Murph ( Jessica Chastain ) has become a brilliant physicist and has solved the gravity problem – which guarantees humanity’s survival.
Under Spielberg’s aegis, the film’s finale – or the path to it – would have been quite different. In the original script, Cooper returns to Earth in the year 2230 only to find a wasteland plagued by ice storms.
In desperation and believing that humans are extinct, he simply lies down on the ground and prepares for his own death in the inhospitable weather.
