Development and financing The premise for
Interstellar was conceived by the producer
Lynda Obst and the theoretical physicist
Kip Thorne, who collaborated on the film
Contact (1997), and had known each other since
Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date. Christopher Nolan met with Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use of
spacetime in the story. He kept in place Jonathan's conception of the first hour, which is set on a
resource-depleted Earth in the near future. The setting was inspired by the
Dust Bowl that took place in the United States during the
Great Depression in the 1930s. More IMAX cameras were used for
Interstellar than for any of Nolan's previous films. To minimize the use of
computer-generated imagery (CGI), Nolan had practical locations built, such as the interior of a space shuttle. Van Hoytema retooled an IMAX camera to be
hand-held for shooting interior scenes. Some of the film's sequences were shot with an IMAX camera installed in the nose cone of a
Learjet. Nolan, who is known for keeping details of his productions secret, strove to ensure secrecy for
Interstellar. Writing for
The Wall Street Journal, Ben Fritz stated, "The famously secretive filmmaker has gone to extreme lengths to guard the script to ...
Interstellar, just as he did with the blockbuster
Dark Knight trilogy." As one security measure,
Interstellar was filmed under the name ''Flora's Letter'', Flora being one of Nolan's four children with producer Emma Thomas. was used as a filming location for
Interstellar, doubling for Mann's planet. The film's
principal photography was scheduled to last four months. It began on , 2013, in the province of
Alberta, Canada. Towns in Alberta where shooting took place included
Nanton,
Longview,
Lethbridge,
Fort Macleod, and
Okotoks. In Okotoks, filming took place at the
Seaman Stadium and the Olde Town Plaza. For a cornfield scene, production designer
Nathan Crowley planted of corn that would be destroyed in an apocalyptic
dust storm scene, intended to be similar to storms experienced during the Dust Bowl in 1930s America. Additional scenes involving the dust storm and McConaughey's character were also shot in
Fort Macleod, where the giant dust clouds were created on location using large fans to blow
cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air. Filming in the province lasted until , 2013 and involved hundreds of extras in addition to members, most of whom were local. Shooting also took place in Iceland, where Nolan had previously filmed scenes for
Batman Begins (2005). It was chosen to represent two extraterrestrial planets: one covered in ice, and the other in water. The crew transported mock spaceships weighing about . They spent two weeks shooting there, during which a crew of about , including , worked on the film. Locations included the Svínafellsjökull glacier and the town of
Klaustur. While filming a water scene in Iceland, Hathaway almost suffered from
hypothermia because her
dry suit had not been properly secured. After the schedule in Iceland was completed, the crew shot in Los Angeles for . Filming locations included the
Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, the
Los Angeles Convention Center, a Sony Pictures
soundstage in
Culver City, and a private residence in
Altadena, California. Principal photography concluded in December 2013. Production had a budget of , less than was allotted by Paramount, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures.
Production design Interstellar features three spacecraft— the
Endurance, a ranger, and a lander. The
Endurance, the crew's
mother ship, is a circular structure consisting of 12 capsules, laid flat to mimic a clock: Four capsules with planetary settling equipment, four with engines, and four with the permanent functions of cockpit, medical labs, and habitation. Production designer Nathan Crowley said the
Endurance was based on the
International Space Station: "It's a real mish-mash of different kinds of technology. You need analogue stuff, as well as digital stuff, you need backup systems and tangible switches. It's really like a submarine in space. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose." The ranger's function is similar to the
Space Shuttle's, being able to enter and exit planetary atmospheres. Lastly, the lander transports the capsules with settling equipment to planetary surfaces. Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter." The film features two robots, CASE and TARS, as well as a dismantled third robot, KIPP. Nolan wanted to avoid making the robots
anthropomorphic and chose a
quadrilateral design. He said: "It has a very complicated design philosophy. It's based on mathematics. You've got four main blocks and they can be joined in three ways. So, you have three combinations you follow. But then within that, it subdivides into a further three joints. And all the places we see lines—those can subdivide further. So you can unfold a finger, essentially, but it's all proportional."
Bill Irwin voiced and physically controlled both robots, with his image digitally removed, and
Josh Stewart replaced his voicing for CASE. The human space habitats resemble
O'Neill cylinders, a theoretical
space habitat model proposed by physicist
Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.
Sound design Gregg Landaker and
Gary A. Rizzo were the film's
audio engineers tasked with
audio mixing, while sound designer
Richard King supervised the process. Christopher Nolan sought to mix the sound to take maximum advantage of theater equipment and paid close attention to designing the sound mix, like focusing on the sound of buttons being pressed with astronaut suit gloves. The studio's website stated that the film was "mixed to maximize the power of the low-end frequencies in the main channels, as well as in the
subwoofer channel." Nolan deliberately intended some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music, causing some theaters to post notices emphasizing that this effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.
Music Hans Zimmer, who scored Nolan's
The Dark Knight Trilogy and
Inception (2010), returned to score
Interstellar. Nolan chose not to provide Zimmer with a script or any plot details but instead gave him a single page that told the story of a father leaving his child for work. It was through this connection that Zimmer created the early stages of the
Interstellar soundtrack. Zimmer and Nolan later decided the 1926 four-manual
Harrison & Harrison organ of the
Temple Church, London, would be the primary instrument for the score. Zimmer conducted 45 scoring sessions for
Interstellar, three times more than for
Inception. The soundtrack was released on November 17, 2014.
Visual effects The visual effects company
DNEG, which collaborated on
Inception, was brought back for
Interstellar. According to visual effects supervisor
Paul Franklin, the number of effects in the film was not much greater than in Nolan's
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or
Inception. However, for
Interstellar, they created the effects first, allowing digital projectors to display them behind the actors, rather than having the actors perform in front of
green screens. The film contained 850 visual-effect shots at a resolution of 5600 × 4000 lines: 150 shots that were created in-camera using digital projectors, and another 700 were created in
post-production. Of those, 620 were presented in IMAX, while the rest were anamorphic. The ranger,
Endurance, and lander spacecraft were created using
miniature effects by Nathan Crowley in collaboration with visual effects company New Deal Studios, as opposed to using computer-generated imagery, as Nolan felt they offered the best way to give the ships a tangible presence in space.
3D-printed and hand-sculpted, the scale models earned the nickname "maxatures" by the crew due to their immense size; the 1/15th-scale miniature of the
Endurance module spanned over , while a
pyrotechnic model of part of the craft was built at 1/5th scale. The Ranger and Lander miniatures spanned and over , respectively, and were large enough for van Hoytema to mount IMAX cameras directly onto the spacecraft, thus mimicking the look of NASA IMAX documentaries. The models were then attached to a six-axis
gimbal on a motion control system that allowed an operator to manipulate their movements, which were filmed against background plates of space using
VistaVision cameras on a smaller motion control rig. New Deal Studio's miniatures were used in 150 special effects shots.
Theme and Influences Nolan was influenced by what he called "key touchstones" of science fiction cinema, including
Metropolis (1927),
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),
Blade Runner (1982),
Star Wars (1977), and
Alien (1979).
Andrei Tarkovsky's
Mirror (1975) influenced "elemental things in the story to do with wind and dust and water", according to Nolan, who also compared
Interstellar to
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as a film about human nature. He sought to emulate films like
Steven Spielberg's
Jaws (1975) and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) for being family-friendly but also "as edgy and incisive and challenging as anything else on the blockbuster spectrum". He screened
The Right Stuff (1983) for the crew before production, following in its example by capturing reflections on the
Interstellar astronauts' visors. For further inspiration, Nolan invited former astronaut
Marsha Ivins to the set. Nolan and his crew studied the IMAX NASA documentaries of filmmaker
Toni Myers for visual reference of spacefaring missions, and strove to imitate their use of IMAX cameras in the enclosed spaces of spacecraft interiors.
Clark Kent's upbringing in
Man of Steel (2013) was the inspiration for the farm setting in the Midwest. Apart from the films, Nolan drew inspiration from the architecture of
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. == Scientific accuracy ==