Examples of Interstellar’s groundbreaking innovations are plentiful, but no great film is born without taking inspiration from the films that came before it, both within and without the genre. Christopher Nolan has personally cited several classic films as having influenced his work on Interstellar. The most notable and prominent of these would be Stanley Kubrick’s critically acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
A marvel of its era, 2001: A Space Odyssey begins dramatically with the appearance of an artificial prism in prehistoric Africa and its influence on the evolution of man, then leading on a journey through man's use of space travel involving space planes and moon communities, a discovery of the same prism on the moon by humans, and a journey to Jupiter in which a spacecraft’s artificially intelligent computer takes control of its commanders. The film has been lauded for, among other things, its dramatic landscapes and beautiful imagery. Of his first time seeing the film, Nolan told Yahoo! Movies, "I sat there with [my dad], watched this imagery unfold and I remember very clearly, that sense of scale, that sense of otherworldliness. You felt lost, you felt like you’d gone across the universe to some very peculiar corner of it. Interstellar is absolutely my attempt to try and give audiences today some of that magical sense of being immersed in a different universe, taken on an incredible journey."
Many elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey are immediately evident in Interstellar: the Space Station V, for example, bears a striking resemblance to the Endurance, both of which are wheel-like structures the rotation of which mimics Earth’s gravity on board. When the Endurance flies into a death spiral and Cooper has to spin the Lander to mimic its rotation, it draws a parallel to the Pan Am space plane in 2001 spinning in slow rotation with the Space Station V, similarly to dock with it. In Interstellar, however, the context is dramatic and tense, while Kubrick’s version is more graceful and whimsical, appearing as a kind of mechanical dance set to Strauss’ “The Blue Danube.”
Other similarities between 2001 and Interstellar include the presence of artificially intelligent robots like TARS and HAL, the mutinous onboard computer in 2001. The former, however, is a properly functioning assistant to Cooper and his crew, even joking with them at times, while HAL was intentionally intimidating, traitorous, and ominously monotone. Finally, the evidence of a higher group of beings in the form of bizarre, supernatural events additionally ties the movies together. In 2001, the dark prism that influences man’s evolution comes without warning or reason, and the “bulk beings” that place the wormhole near Saturn and scoop Cooper up in the tesseract in Interstellar are similarly shrouded in mystery. In both scenarios, the beings send an influence to “present-day” humanity to help them, and in both films the audience is left only to infer how vastly advanced and omnipresent they may be.
For all 2001’s influence on Interstellar, it’s far from the only such film. Star Wars (1977), for example, had a huge impact on Christopher Nolan, not only as creative fodder for his 2014 film but also on his career as a filmmaker. As a child, it inspired him to such an extent that he made a rudimentary film of his own in 1978 based on the movie, called Space Wars. When making Interstellar, Nolan told Empire Magazine, "My rule of thumb was we didn’t want any kind of gratuitous futurism in the sets. Everything would be functional and feel real to the actors. They could flip the switches and use the control stick and actually have it feel like it means something.”
Other films that influenced Interstellar include James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E (2008), which Jonathan Nolan used as inspiration when writing the initial drafts of Interstellar’s screenplay. Christopher Nolan has additionally cited Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as having influenced Interstellar.
