108 Fun Facts About Interstellar

Early in Interstellar, which machines leave the fields by themselves and gather at Cooper's farmhouse?

Combine harvesters: the unmanned machines peel off from the fields one by one and roll up to the house, and magnetism gets the blame.

Which actor plays Cooper, the father who leaves his children to lead the Endurance mission in Interstellar?

Matthew McConaughey caught Christopher Nolan's eye in an early cut of the small drama Mud, before his Oscar; the director wanted an everyman the audience could experience the story with.

In Interstellar, the wormhole the Endurance crew travels through sits near which planet?

Saturn is a two-year voyage for the Endurance, and the wormhole beside it had appeared 48 years earlier; because wormholes do not form naturally, NASA concludes that someone placed it there.

In Interstellar, what name does the crew give the giant black hole beyond the wormhole?

Gargantua was rendered from real relativity equations, and the work yielded new insights into how black holes bend light, published in a physics journal.

Which theoretical physicist and later Nobel laureate helped conceive Interstellar and served as its executive producer?

Kip Thorne argued Nolan out of letting a character travel faster than light; the director says the physicist kept explaining it was impossible until he conceded.

Who plays Dr. Amelia Brand, the biologist on the Endurance crew in Interstellar?

Anne Hathaway kept filming in frigid water after her suit sprang a leak, then asked what the symptoms of hypothermia were.

Which actress plays the adult Murph, Cooper's scientist daughter, in Interstellar?

Jessica Chastain's Murph records a message on the birthday that makes her the age Cooper was when he left, telling him it would be a really good time to come back.

Which veteran actor plays Professor John Brand, the NASA scientist behind the mission in Interstellar?

Michael Caine's Professor Brand confesses to Murph on his deathbed that he lied: Plan A, saving the people already on Earth, was never possible.

Who voices and puppeteers the robot TARS in Interstellar?

Bill Irwin, a stage comic, moved the block-shaped robot around the set himself on a specially built rig, so TARS was physically there with the actors; Josh Stewart voiced its companion CASE.

Which actor plays Dr. Mann, the scientist found stranded on an ice planet in Interstellar?

Matt Damon's Dr. Mann turns out to have faked his planet's promising data so that someone would come and rescue him, and he then tries to kill Cooper.

How does Dr. Mann die in Interstellar?

An airlock decompression while docking kills him: Mann opens the hatch on an imperfect seal, and the blast sends the Endurance spinning, forcing Cooper's 'It's necessary' docking.

In Interstellar, each hour on Miller's planet costs roughly how many years back on Earth?

Seven years per hour means the crew's short stop costs them 23 years, and Cooper comes back to a backlog of video messages from children who have grown up without him.

What natural hazard nearly kills the crew on Miller's water planet in Interstellar?

A colossal tsunami: what look like distant mountains are waves, and the one that hits kills a crew member and floods the engines, stranding the crew while time races by on Earth.

Why does Interstellar's ring-shaped Endurance spin?

Artificial gravity: once the crew is aboard, the ring spins up to one G, and the motion leaves one of the scientists needing motion-sickness pills.

What crop is Cooper growing on his farm when Interstellar opens?

Corn: designer Nathan Crowley planted 500 acres of it for the film to wreck in a dust storm, and Nolan says so much survived that the production made money on the crop.

Which composer wrote the score for Interstellar?

Hans Zimmer was given no script, only a one-page letter about a father leaving his child for an important job, and one day to write music for it. Nolan said that piece gave him the heart of the movie.

Which instrument dominates the score of Interstellar?

A pipe organ: the composer chose the 1926 instrument in London's Temple Church, saying its pipes look like spaceship afterburners and that you can hear the giant machine breathe.

Interstellar won its only Academy Award in which category?

Best Visual Effects was its one win from five nominations: to draw the black hole, the effects team wrote new rendering software from a physicist's equations.

Which Disney film beat Interstellar to number one on their shared US opening weekend?

Big Hero 6 won the weekend with $56.2 million to Interstellar's $47.5 million, even though Interstellar had led on the day they both opened wide.

Interstellar's scenes on Dr. Mann's frozen planet were shot on a glacier in which country?

Iceland: recent volcanic eruptions had streaked the chosen glacier with grey ash, giving Mann's frozen planet a marbled look the designers could not have planned.

Interstellar's farmhouse was built with mountains on the horizon in which Canadian province?

Alberta: Nolan wanted mountains behind the farm, so the crew built the house from scratch outside Calgary and brought in huge fans to blow its dust storms.

Cinemas using which format got Interstellar two days early?

Film prints: cinemas that could still run 35mm or 70mm got it two days early, a win for Nolan's campaign to keep film alive after most had switched to digital.

Which director was originally attached to Interstellar when it began development in 2006?

Steven Spielberg was set to direct from Jonathan Nolan's script, and when Spielberg left, the job passed to the writer's brother Christopher.

What is the higher-dimensional space where Cooper sees into Murph's bedroom in Interstellar called?

A tesseract: Cooper works out that the beings who built it are not aliens at all but humans from the far future, reaching back to save their own ancestors.

In Interstellar, young Murph believes a 'ghost' is trying to reach her through what?

Her bookshelf: books keep dropping from it, and the ghost pushing them out turns out to be her own father, reaching back to her from years in the future.

In Interstellar, how does Cooper send the black hole's quantum data to Murph?

Ticks of a watch's second hand: Cooper taps the data out in Morse code on the watch he gave Murph before he left, and years later she notices the hand twitching.

Which poem does Interstellar's Professor Brand recite?

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: Dylan Thomas's poem urges a fight against death, yet the professor reciting it already knows the people left on Earth cannot be saved.

In Interstellar's final scenes, how does the rebuilt TARS respond to a 75 percent humor setting?

It fakes a self-destruct countdown, so Cooper hastily drops the setting to 60 percent, and TARS answers that with 'Knock, knock.'

According to Cooper in Interstellar, what does Murphy's law actually mean?

Whatever can happen will happen: Cooper says it to comfort young Murph, who has asked why her parents named her after something bad.

Which two words complete Cooper's Interstellar line "Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to…"?

'Die here': Cooper says it to his father-in-law Donald, arguing that the world is a treasure but has been telling them to leave for a while.

In Interstellar, what does Amelia Brand call the one thing we can perceive that transcends time and space?

Love: Brand says it to argue for Edmunds' planet, where the man she loves had landed. Cooper overrules her, and hers turns out to be the world where the colony is founded.

Which cinematographer shot Interstellar, replacing Nolan's regular collaborator Wally Pfister?

Hoyte van Hoytema, who had shot Her and Let the Right One In, got the job because Wally Pfister had left to direct a film of his own, Transcendence.

Which documentary supplied the elderly survivors' interviews that open Interstellar?

Ken Burns's The Dust Bowl: Nolan asked Burns for permission to reuse its real 1930s survivors, whose memories play in the film as if they were recalling its future blight.

Instead of green screen, what did Nolan put outside the spacecraft windows while filming Interstellar?

Projections of the finished effects: the space imagery was made before the shoot and thrown onto huge screens around the set, so an actor told to look at a black hole really saw one.

What did Interstellar's crew build to film its spacecraft flying through space?

Huge physical miniatures: Nolan felt real models gave the ships a presence that computer graphics could not, and they were built so large that the crew nicknamed them 'maxatures'.

What complaint about Interstellar's sound led some cinemas to post notices?

Dialogue was drowned out by music, so one New York multiplex put up signs saying its equipment was working properly and the film sounded the way Nolan intended.

Which studio distributed Interstellar in the United States, with Warner Bros. handling international markets?

Paramount Pictures had Interstellar first, and Warner Bros., which had released Nolan's Batman films, reportedly traded away rights in other films for a stake.

What does Interstellar's Endurance carry for Plan B?

Human embryos, some 5,000 of them on ice: Plan B would raise a new colony from scratch on another world and leave everyone still on Earth to die.

Which actor plays Cooper's son Tom as an adult farmer in Interstellar?

Casey Affleck's Tom keeps recording video messages for his absent father, who then watches him marry, lose a first son and finally say goodbye in a single sitting.

Which Endurance scientist stays aboard and grows old waiting while his crewmates visit the water planet in Interstellar?

Romilly stays behind to study the black hole, and the short trip his crewmates make to the surface costs him more than two decades, leaving him grey-bearded when they return.

Who plays Donald, Cooper's father-in-law, who stays behind on the farm in Interstellar?

John Lithgow's Donald tells Cooper that he is the one who doesn't belong in this world, born forty years too late or forty years too early.

Which visual effects company created the black hole and wormhole imagery for Interstellar?

Double Negative had to write a completely new renderer for the job, because light passing a black hole bends instead of travelling in the straight lines its software assumed.

In Interstellar, the earlier one-way scouting missions to the candidate planets were named after which biblical figure?

Lazarus: when Cooper calls the name cheerful, he is reminded that Lazarus came back from the dead, and he answers that Lazarus had to die in the first place.

Where does Cooper wake up after being pulled out of the black hole in Interstellar?

On a huge space station: it is called Cooper Station, and when he says it was nice of them to name it after him, he is told it is named after his daughter.

Which famous astronomer set up the blind date between the producer and the physicist who later conceived Interstellar?

Carl Sagan's blind date began a long collaboration: the pair later worked on the film of his novel Contact, then wrote the treatment that became Interstellar.

Which future star plays the 15-year-old Tom Cooper in Interstellar?

Timothée Chalamet's Tom is steered into farming by a school that says his test score rules out college, a verdict that infuriates his father.

Which Oscar-winning actress plays the elderly Murph near the end of Interstellar?

Ellen Burstyn's Murph, now an old woman while her father has barely aged, tells him from her deathbed not to stay and watch her die but to go and find Brand.

Which 'useless machine' does Interstellar's Cooper say his wife's doctors needed?

MRI scanner: with one, Cooper says, doctors would have found the cyst in his wife's brain before she died instead of afterwards, his retort to a teacher who has just called rockets useless machines.

Warner Bros. reportedly gave up its rights in which horror franchise to buy into Interstellar?

Friday the 13th: Warner Bros. reportedly also threw in its share of a future South Park movie, so keen was it to join a Nolan film set up at a rival studio.

Which film did Nolan screen for his crew before shooting Interstellar?

The Right Stuff: Nolan had the crew study how the 1983 astronaut drama had handled reflections in visors.

What is the name of the dismantled third robot found at Dr. Mann's base in Interstellar?

KIPP did most of the scouting on Mann's frozen planet until Mann dismantled it and booby-trapped its memory, which held the data that gave his lie away.

Why does Cooper drop his craft into the black hole late in Interstellar?

To shed weight so Brand escapes: he cites Newton's third law, saying the only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind.

Interstellar's production designer based the Endurance on which real spacecraft?

The International Space Station: designer Nathan Crowley wanted a ship patched together from real, tangible hardware, 'like a submarine in space' where every inch has a purpose.

In Interstellar, the drone Cooper captures comes from which country?

India: the drone has been flying on its own for ten years, and Cooper brings it down for solar cells that he says could power an entire farm.

Which fantasy author called Interstellar the most ambitious sci-fi film since Kubrick's 2001?

George R. R. Martin wrote it while listing his Hugo Award picks, saying he would nominate Interstellar as the best film of its year ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Which private rocket company did Nolan visit while researching Interstellar?

SpaceX: Nolan said space travel stopped being an abstraction for him once he walked in and found people actually building rockets.

In Interstellar, the family is watching which sport when a huge dust storm rolls in?

Baseball: Cooper remarks that when he was a boy people were too busy fighting over food to play it, and the family has to leave the game as the wall of dust arrives.

What shape is the wormhole in Interstellar?

A sphere: a crew member explains that a hole drawn as a circle in two dimensions becomes a ball in three, and the effects team's version looked like a crystal ball reflecting the universe.

Interstellar's science adviser spent two weeks talking Nolan out of letting a character do what?

Travel faster than light broke the physicist's first rule, that nothing in the film could violate established physical laws. Nolan finally gave up.

Interstellar topped which chart for 2015, with a total estimated at 46.7 million?

Most pirated film of 2015 was the title Interstellar took, with its downloads counted on BitTorrent. It had also led the legal home video sales chart for two weeks.

Which director said Interstellar's all-enveloping dust belonged in a Terrence Malick film?

Quentin Tarantino said it had been a while since anybody came out with such a big vision. He put the film's dust-choked Earth alongside the work of Andrei Tarkovsky too.

The poem Professor Brand keeps reciting in Interstellar was written by which poet?

Dylan Thomas is thought to have written it for his own dying father, which suits a film about a parent and child parted by time. Dr. Mann recites it in the film as well.

In Interstellar, what is killing off Earth's food crops one by one and pushing humanity toward extinction?

Blight is destroying the harvests while dust storms sweep the land. One astrobiologist objected that even a voracious blight would need millions of years to use up the oxygen in the air.

At the end of Interstellar, Amelia Brand is founding humanity's new colony on the world scouted by whom?

Edmunds had landed on the one habitable world, which the crew passed over twice in favour of other planets. Brand and a robot are building the colony there when Cooper sets off to join her.

In Interstellar, Cooper deduces that the unseen beings helping humanity are really who?

Humans from the future, far more advanced, built the strange space he falls into so that he could reach Murph across time. Until then an unknown intelligence was assumed to be at work.

Which actress, earlier Renesmee in the Twilight films, plays ten-year-old Murph in Interstellar?

Mackenzie Foy shares the part with two older actresses, because Murph ages from a child to a woman on her deathbed while her father hardly ages at all.

Which astrophysicist said of Interstellar's ending that interacting with the past is theoretically possible?

Neil deGrasse Tyson added that nobody really knows what is inside a black hole, so the film was free to take the idea and run with it.

On his deathbed in Interstellar, what does Professor Brand confess to Murph about his plan to evacuate Earth?

He knew it could never work, because finishing the equation needed measurements from inside a black hole. The Endurance crew had never been meant to come home.

In Interstellar, what does Dr. Mann admit to Cooper while the two men scout the surface of his icy planet?

He faked his data in the hope that somebody would come and rescue him from a world no one could settle. He then tries to kill Cooper and seize the Endurance.

After the water planet in Interstellar, why does the crew spend its remaining fuel on reaching Dr. Mann's world?

He was still broadcasting, which swayed Cooper even though Brand argued hard for the third planet. With fuel for only one more landing, the choice could not be undone.

How do the Endurance crew find Dr. Mann when they first reach his base on the ice planet in Interstellar?

Asleep in cryostasis, he has to be woken by the crew, and he then assures them that people could settle his frozen world. Cooper learns otherwise only once the two are alone.

In Interstellar, the dust lines on Murph's bedroom floor turn out to be coordinates written in which form?

Binary code in the settled dust gives map coordinates that lead Cooper and Murph to a hidden base. An unexplained anomaly, not a ghost, had laid the pattern down.

In Interstellar, how is Dr. Amelia Brand related to the professor who runs the secret space programme?

His daughter flies on the Endurance as the scientist in charge of settling a new planet, while her father stays on Earth to work at his equation.

Which American Beauty actor plays the Endurance crewman who dies on the water planet in Interstellar?

Wes Bentley, also the gamemaker Seneca Crane in The Hunger Games, plays the first member of the Endurance crew to die.

Which That '70s Show star plays Getty, the colleague who works beside the adult Murph in Interstellar?

Topher Grace, the sitcom's Eric Forman, plays Getty as both a workmate and a romantic partner for Murph. He had earlier been Venom in Spider-Man 3.

Which actor, Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma that same year, appears as the school principal in Interstellar?

David Oyelowo plays the principal, with Collette Wolfe as a teacher at the same school. His portrayal of the civil rights leader won him wide critical acclaim.

Which Life of Pi actor was offered a part in Interstellar and turned it down over a scheduling conflict?

Irrfan Khan had clashing commitments, so the offer went no further. Western audiences also knew him as the police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire.

Interstellar's producer and science adviser had earlier worked together on which 1997 film?

Contact starred Jodie Foster as a scientist who picks up the first message from another world. Interstellar's future leading man had a supporting part in it.

Nolan chose Interstellar's leading man after seeing an early cut of which 2012 drama about a fugitive?

Mud showed him the everyman he wanted at the centre of the story. He got to see it early because he was a friend of one of its producers.

Jonathan Nolan studied relativity at which university during his four years on Interstellar's script?

Caltech was where the film's science adviser held his professorship, so the screenwriter went there to learn the physics that the plot would lean on.

Which animated film, along with Avatar, gave Jonathan Nolan apocalyptic inspiration for Interstellar?

WALL-E imagines an Earth abandoned to its own rubbish. The screenwriter was also gloomy about the end of the Space Shuttle and the lack of money for a crewed Mars mission.

Nolan cut which phenomenon from Interstellar's script, then regretted it when LIGO detected it?

Gravitational waves were how the wormhole was first spotted in the original script. Scientists announced the first real detection little more than a year after the film opened.

Interstellar's science adviser says which feature of Dr. Mann's planet takes the greatest liberty with physics?

Its clouds of ice are solid structures that no ice would be strong enough to hold up, and one astrobiologist added that they ought to fall straight out of the sky.

Which physicist said Interstellar could set the gold standard for science fiction movies?

Michio Kaku praised the film for its scientific accuracy. Back in 1974 he had co-written the first papers to describe string theory in a field form.

The colonies shown at the end of Interstellar resemble which design proposed by a physicist in the 1970s?

The O'Neill cylinder grew out of a design task its inventor set his physics students at Princeton, to show that people could live in space permanently.

Interstellar's Endurance has capsules for engines, labs and cabins laid flat in a ring to mimic which object?

A clock has twelve hours and the ship has twelve capsules: four for engines, four for settling equipment and four for the cockpit, medical labs and living quarters.

Interstellar was made under which Christopher Nolan production label?

Syncopy is run by Nolan with the producer Emma Thomas. Before Interstellar it had made his Dark Knight films and Inception.

After the water planet in Interstellar, how does Cooper catch up on his children's lives?

Video messages sent from Earth over the years show him Tom marrying and becoming a father, and then Murph herself, by now a grown scientist.

Short of fuel in Interstellar, Cooper and Brand use the black hole to perform which manoeuvre?

A slingshot around the black hole flings the ship onward, but time runs so slowly near it that the move costs the crew another 51 years.

Christopher Nolan made his first-ever appearance at which fan convention in order to promote Interstellar?

San Diego Comic-Con hosted the director and the film's leading man in July, a first visit for both, about four months before the film reached cinemas.

A puzzle website promoting Interstellar let users uncover a star chart linked to which historic space mission?

Apollo 11, the first crewed Moon landing, was the thread running through the interactive site. A later relaunch on a Google domain added a game for building Solar System models.

Christopher Nolan went to visit Interstellar's future leading man while he was filming which HBO crime series?

True Detective cast him as the brooding detective Rust Cohle, and its first season went out in the same year that the space epic reached cinemas.

Outside North America and China, which country was Interstellar's biggest market, earning over $73 million?

South Korea sold 9.1 million tickets within a month, leaving only Avatar and Frozen ahead of it among foreign films there at the time.

Which comedy sequel opened above Interstellar in its second US weekend and helped push it down to third place?

Dumb and Dumber To brought Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels back as Lloyd and Harry twenty years after the original. Interstellar still took another $29 million that weekend.

Before Interstellar opened, fans could tour the Endurance in virtual reality using which headset?

Oculus Rift headsets were still developer kits then, well over a year before the consumer model went on sale. The tour stopped in New York, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington.

Which magazine published Absolute Zero, a prequel comic about Dr. Mann written by Interstellar's director?

Wired released the comic online with art by Sean Gordon Murphy. It makes the stranded scientist its protagonist, before the Endurance has even set out.

Which Sleepless in Seattle producer co-wrote the eight-page treatment that grew into Interstellar?

Lynda Obst wrote the treatment with a physicist friend, then stayed on as a producer for the eight years between the project's announcement and its release.

Which Endurance crew member dies during the brief landing on Miller's planet in Interstellar?

Doyle is lost before he can get back aboard, the first death of the mission, and the two survivors find that they cannot lift off straight away.

In Interstellar, how much time has passed aboard the Endurance when Cooper and Brand return from Miller's planet?

23 years have gone by on the ship, although the landing party spent only a few hours on the surface. Their crewmate has waited alone the whole time.

When the Endurance team lands on Miller's planet in Interstellar, what do they find of her expedition?

Only wreckage is left, lying in knee-high water, so the world that had sent back such promising data gives the crew nothing but a costly delay.

What keeps the Interstellar landing craft stuck on Miller's planet while precious time drains away on Earth?

Waterlogged engines have to drain before the craft can fly, and at the planet's rate every minute of waiting costs more than a month back on Earth.

In Interstellar, why is the Endurance parked far from Miller's planet while a small landing party goes down?

To avoid the slowed time, the mother ship keeps a safe distance from the black hole's pull, so its clocks run far faster than those on the surface.

Interstellar's science adviser used whose equations to make the time-slowing on Miller's planet work?

Albert Einstein showed that clocks run slower where gravity is stronger, and the adviser searched those relativity equations for conditions extreme enough.

Told that the time-slowing on Miller's planet was impossible, how did Interstellar's director reply?

It was non-negotiable, the director insisted, so the shocked physicist went home, did the calculations and found a way to make the numbers work.

The Interstellar science adviser calculated what fate for Miller's planet if the black hole were much lighter?

Being torn apart is the fate he worked out, because a smaller black hole pulls far more unevenly across a planet. That fixed the hole's mass at 100 million Suns or more.

To allow the time-slowing on Miller's planet, Interstellar's science adviser found the black hole must do what?

Spin almost at its limit, short of the maximum by about one part in 100 trillion, was what the sums demanded. Unlikely in nature, he wrote, but possible.

Filming a water scene for Interstellar, the lead actress nearly suffered what in a badly sealed dry suit?

Hypothermia nearly set in as cold water got inside the suit. The two-week location shoot that covered the film's ocean world involved a crew of about 350.

Interstellar had its world premiere at which Hollywood cinema, fitted with a 70 mm IMAX projector for the film?

TCL Chinese Theatre had the projector installed so the film could be shown in the large format it was shot in. Over 900 actors' guild members had seen it there days earlier.