Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity.īrothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay, which had its origins in a script Jonathan developed in 2007. Christopher produced Interstellar with his wife, Emma Thomas, through their production company Syncopy, and with Lynda Obst through Lynda Obst Productions. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was an executive producer, acted as scientific consultant, and wrote a tie-in book, The Science of Interstellar. Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures co-financed the film. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on 35 mm in anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm. Principal photography began in late 2013 and took place in Alberta (Canada), Iceland and Los Angeles. Interstellar uses extensive practical and miniature effects and the company Double Negative created additional digital effects.
Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014, in Los Angeles, California. In the United States, it was first released on film stock, expanding to venues using digital projectors. The film had a worldwide gross of over $677 million, making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. Interstellar received critical praise for its themes, visual effects, musical score, and acting. At the 87th Academy Awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Production Design. In the mid-21st century, crop blights and dust storms threaten humanity's survival. Joseph Cooper, a widowed engineer and former NASA pilot, runs a farm with his father-in-law Donald, son Tom, and daughter Murph. Living in a post-truth society, Cooper is reprimanded for telling Murph that the Apollo missions did occur he encourages her to carefully observe and record what she sees. They discover that strange dust patterns, which Murph first attributes to a ghost, result from gravity variations and translate into geographic coordinates.
These lead them to a secret NASA facility headed by Cooper's former supervisor, Professor John Brand, who explains that 48 years earlier a wormhole appeared near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with twelve potentially habitable planets located near a black hole named "Gargantua". Twelve volunteers had previously traveled through the wormhole to evaluate the planets, and astronauts Miller, Edmunds, and Mann reported positive results.