Skip to main content

Christopher Nolan talks up the science of 'Interstellar' in surprise Comic-Con appearance

Christopher Nolan talks up the science of 'Interstellar' in surprise Comic-Con appearance

/

Expect wormholes

Share this story

Details on the plot of Christopher Nolan's upcoming Interstellar are still scarce, but the film may be his most ambitious to date. In a surprise appearance at Comic-Con, the director of The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception says that his latest film is his grandest in scope. One of the film's executive producers is the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who gave Nolan extensive guidance on how wormholes could work — a hint at how the film's characters will accomplish their interstellar travel. But the film's emotional core lies deeper, the director said. "It's about what it is to be human, and what our place is in the universe," Nolan told a rapt crowd in Hall H. "The further that you travel out into the universe, the more you realize it's in what's in here," he said, pointing to his heart.

Nolan was joined on stage by the film's star, Matthew McConaughey, who reiterated what was previously disclosed about the plot: that it involves his character, an astronaut named Cooper, and his efforts to find another planet for humanity to live on after earth becomes uninhabitable. A new trailer shown to the Comic-Con crowd showed McConaughey and co-star Anne Hathaway, who plays a fellow astronaut, as they hunt for an inhabitable planet. The trailer will be released more broadly sometime in the future, Nolan said.

Both the director and star say that the drama of Interstellar lies in Cooper's conflicting loyalties — one to the human race, and the other to the family he's leaving behind, possibly forever. "By far it's the most ambitious film that Christopher Nolan has ever directed," McConaughey said. The film is scheduled to be released on November 7th.