Christopher Nolan is known for movies that are realistic even while dealing with fantastical settings (e.g. his Batman trilogy) or ones that are beyond what we know. In Interstellar, which depicts travel through a wormhole, exploration of new habitable worlds in the vastness of space, and the experience of being sucked into a black hole, this is no easy task. However, Nolan works hard to establish the film's premise, including its dystopian beginning on Earth. Nolan chose to ground the film via real documentary footage from a PBS documentary by Ken Burns called, "The Dust Bowl." In the 1930s, farming in the midwest was nearly wiped out by a lack of water that caused major dust storms, killing crops and forcing families to move to the outskirts of the country. Nolan ominously injects similar circumstances into Interstellar, but expands the narrative using a mixture of Burns' footage and his own to tie his grim future to the very real past. This is an intentional commentary on the effects of climate change, overpopulation, and humanity's general hubris in abusing the planet's resources.
Nolan worked closely with executive producer Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist and longtime colleague of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, to ensure the film was as scientifically realistic as possible. Thorne proposed two rules for Nolan to heed throughout the film's production: that nothing would violate established physical laws, and that all the film's fantastic speculations would spring from science, not from the creative mind of a screenwriter. Nolan agreed to both, on the condition that he be allowed to tell his story unimpeded. Despite the ground rules, Nolan often butted heads with Thorne over the accuracies of some of his propositions. In one example, Nolan was adamant that one hour on Miller's planet be equal to 7 years back on Earth to heighten the stakes and help the plot. Thorne initially insisted that it was impossible for a planet to exist so close to a black hole's event horizon as to experience such a time slippage, but when Nolan pressed him to check the math again, Thorne was surprised and humbled to see that he had been wrong, and that it was in fact possible. It was one of several instances in which Nolan's creative optimism and perseverance helped render a more accurate and believable story. On the other hand, there were also times when Nolan was forced to concede the impossibility of his ideas, as when he proposed a scene in which the film's characters travel faster than the speed of light, which Thorne spent two weeks vehemently convincing him to give up.
Nolan has a knack for creating characters who are motivated by a well-formed background, making their choices deeply personal and meaningful. His characters often pay a price for choosing between what is right or carrying the weight of not doing anything at all, such as Bruce Wayne in the Dark Knight trilogy, and Cooper in Interstellar. Nolan sometimes allows his characters to be broken heroes, or even what some may call "anti-heroes." Most importantly, though, he allows them to be human and flawed (just like us).
