Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey in Friday film Interstellar

Although many of Christopher Nolan’s movies happen simultaneously in the past, present and future, he almost never works on weekends. He made an exception, though, on a Saturday early this fall, while he was in New York. He was visiting theatres to make sure they were properly prepared to project his new movie, Interstellar.

Nolan never keeps anybody waiting. At 10am sharp, he was greeted at the Bow Tie Cinema on 23rd Street in Chelsea by Adam Cole with the film print. Cole, who has been Nolan’s post-production coordinator for the last two films, had been there since 7 in the morning. He was wearing a bow tie, only slightly askew, an expression of the odd sartorial discipline that all of Nolan’s collaborators seem to share.

Nolan’s own look accords with his strict regimen of optimal resource allocation and flexibility. He long ago decided it was a waste of energy to choose anew what to wear each day. The ensemble is smart with a hint of frowzy, a dark, narrow-lapel jacket over a blue dress shirt with a lightly fraying collar, plus durable black trousers over scuffed, sensible shoes. In colder weather, Nolan outfits himself with a fitted herringbone waistcoat, the bottom button left open. A pair of woven periwinkle cuff links and rather garish striped socks represent his only concessions to whimsy or sentimentality; they have about them the sweet, gestural, last-minute air of Father’s Day presents.

Thick quotient of reality to support looping plots

Despite the civilised and civilising exterior, Nolan was a little anxious that morning. He is comfortable with the fact that his filmmaking practice rests on the expertise of his team — he calls himself a jack-of-all-trades and emphasises the “master of none” — but film projection, the final gate before the audience, was a dying art, and there were fewer and fewer people around he could trust.

We navigated in the descending dark toward Nolan’s preferred seats, third-row centre, swinging briefly by Nolan’s assistant of four years, Andy Thompson, to wordlessly exchange an empty takeaway cup of tea for a fresh thermos. (“Andy can get me tea on a glacier,” Nolan said, with a sort of puzzled appreciation.) Nolan seemed comfortable as he settled in, if a little apprehensive about the screen, which was recently installed.

“When I first walked in, I worried that perhaps the screen had been hung just a little too high, but these headrests are very nice.” The screen was silver, designed for 3D movies, and he worried his peak whites would go grey. The face of Matthew McConaughey, who stars in the film, materialised on the screen in front of us. “Those whites are okay. Not bad. This is encouraging.”

Nolan is a gestalt thinker and entertainer, and he thinks that it’s technical details like these that make the theatrical experience a vivid and continuous dream. “When you have planets and stars, you never want to make people feel as though the screen is too small,” Nolan told me. “Otherwise they’ll worry there’s nothing off-screen.”

Nolan, whose eight movies over 14 years have together generated just more than $3.5 billion in revenue, puts an extraordinary amount of time and effort into engineering believably ample worlds. He tries to build maps the size of the territory, whole cities from the ground up in disused airship hangars, even if he’s going to shoot just a few street-corner scenes. Sue Kroll, the president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros, told me she once got actually lost in the ersatz rain falling on an ersatz Gotham. Nolan learned the value of such sweep from Ridley Scott. The genius of Blade Runner, he told me, is that “you never feel like you’ve gotten close to the edge of the world.”

Nolan’s movies require this thick quotient of reality to support his looping plots, which accelerate in shifting time signatures, consume themselves in recursive intrigue and advance formidable and enchanting problems of interpretation.

@ Memento, the Sundance favourite that brought him instant acclaim at age 30, is a noir thriller with the chronology of reverse-spliced helix.

@ Insomnia, the only one of his nine films for which he did not receive at least a share of the writing credit, was somewhat more straightforward — a moody, tortured psychological thriller — but its real trick was to gain him access to studio work and studio budgets.

@ The Prestige, a Victorian duelling-magician drama, is a clever bit of prestidigitation, as well as a canny commentary on film and technology.

@ Inception was a heist movie that took place in a series of nested dreamscapes.

@ Nolan’s Batman movies, though basically linear in structure, resonated broadly as shadowy political allegories.

Successor to both spielberg and kubrick

Part of the reason his work has done so well at the box office is that his audience members — and not just his fans, but his critics — find themselves watching his movies twice, or three times, bleary-eyed and shivering in their dusky light, hallucinating wheels within wheels and stopping only to blog about the finer points. These blogs pose questions along the lines of “If the fact that the white van is in free-fall off the bridge in the first dream means that, in the second dream, there’s zero gravity in the hotel, then why is there still normal gravity in the third dream’s Alpine fortress?”

That his films manage to be both mainstream blockbusters and objects of such cult appeal is what makes Nolan a singular, and singularly admired, figure in Hollywood. He is commonly found sharing discriminating sentences of praise with James Cameron on the one hand and Paul Thomas Anderson on the other; he has been anointed, without any apparent campaigning on his own behalf, the successor of both Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. His loyalists have consistently and strenuously defended him against critics who claim that although he may be a masterful technician, he’s not a visionary or true auteur. Regardless of the visionary question, however, it’s pretty much impossible to think of a film that grossed more than a billion dollars and is better than The Dark Knight — or, to think of it in the way that Nolan prefers, a better film that was seen, so many times over, by so many people.

It’s also hard to see how Interstellar won’t make another billion-plus dollars and thus deepen Nolan’s mystique as the one studio director who’s not a studio hack, as the solitary Hollywood icon who somehow does enormous, surprising, profitable things his own way.

The movie had its origins in 2006, as a collaboration between a theoretical physicist, Caltech’s Kip Thorne, and an independent producer, Lynda Obst. The project was at Paramount, and Nolan’s brother Jonathan — who goes by Jonah — was hired to write the screenplay; Spielberg was attached as director. But by 2011, the project became available, and Nolan signed on to rewrite and direct, as long as the project could be a joint venture with Warner Bros, Nolan’s longtime studio home.

To hear Nolan tell it, however, the film’s true origin story begins much earlier, when Nolan was seven; his father, a British advertising copywriter, took him to see, within the span of about a year, the initial release of Star Wars and a theatrical rerelease of 2001. The age of seven, perhaps not coincidentally, was also the year in which he started to make his own movies, on a Super 8 he borrowed from his dad. Those two movies have remained his touchstones, and Interstellar represents his opportunity to repay his debt to both of them at the same time. Jonah, when he came to visit the set and saw the spaceships, said to him, “Of course we’re doing something like this; this was our whole childhood.”

Nolan’s film is set roughly two generations hence, in a grim, shrunken, retrograde era. The plot revolves around the relationship between an iconoclastic space pilot named Cooper, played by McConaughey, and his bright, stubborn daughter, played in her youth by Mackenzie Foy. Armies and technology have been rendered immaterial, and a delusional “caretaker” generation is barely getting by, for the moment, on subsistence agriculture.

Cooper was trained as a pilot and an engineer before the great regression, and the broader attenuation of our human drive, forced him into farming. Michael Caine’s Professor Brand, Cooper’s old mentor and now the head of a much-reduced, fly-by-night NASA, persuades him to fly off into the unknown. Future NASA is led by six people around a conference table, one more instance of the professional tranquillity that acts as a necessary prelude and backdrop to his subsequent lunacy.

That’s as much as you get from the trailers, which feature McConaughey’s exhortation to new greatness over stock space-age footage and makes the movie look like so much Apollo 13 schmaltz. But in fact that covers only the first 20 minutes of an almost three-hour film, the balance of which resembles a George Lucas interpretation of a Borges story. As far as sci-fi goes, it’s closer to Soderbergh’s Solaris than to Tarkovsky’s. But even after everything goes satisfyingly bananas, the movie remains grounded in a basic humanism.

The depth and solidity of the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murphy, and the swift, sure strokes with which it is realised — she’s the sidekick who makes sure he remembers his bolt-cutters — is what differentiates Interstellar from Nolan’s other movies, where the human relationships can feel like an afterthought.

JUST TEA

In California, his waistcoat retired, Nolan peered across a glassed-in conference room in a nondescript post-production facility. With his cleft chin, widow’s peak, greying blond spill of wispy forelock and rinsed blue eyes, Christopher Nolan is not without a glint of the deranged engineer; he has the affect of a Victorian barrister with a sideline in flying contraptions. His teeth are tanned a chestnut gradient, not by cigarettes but by tea. Caine, who has worked with Nolan on six movies, told me: “He always has a flask of tea in his pocket. No matter how hot it is, he has a big overcoat with a pocket big enough for his tea, and he quietly sips it. At a certain point, I thought, There must be something better than tea in there. I asked him, ‘You’ve not got vodka in there, have you?’ He said no, just tea.”

Nolan made his first film, Following, on $6,000 over the course of a year, shooting perhaps 15 minutes of footage each Saturday. It’s a very clever con-man/murder drama that owes more than a little to Hitchcock, with a sliced-up, rearranged chronology that prefigures Memento. He and Jonah discussed the idea for Memento on their road trip from Chicago to Hollywood. They went on to film it over 25½ days on a budget of $4.5 million.

After that, when he came across the script of Insomnia, a remake of a Norwegian psychological thriller, Warner Bros had the option. Nolan was interested but couldn’t get a meeting. His agent, Dan Aloni, called Steven Soderbergh, an early fan of Memento. Soderbergh told me that he “just walked across the lot and said to the head of production, ‘You’re insane if you don’t meet with this guy.’ My sense even then was that he didn’t need our help except to get in the door.” Nolan made the film on a budget of $46 million, and Soderbergh and George Clooney signed on as executive producers. Soderbergh visited the set in Alaska. “I got there and was having a conversation with Al Pacino: ‘How do you feel? How’s it going?’ Al said, ‘Well, I can tell you right now, at some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie’. ”

The film went on to gross $113 million worldwide and showed Warners he could handle the demands of a studio movie. “Chris is legendary for being prepared, being on time, on schedule,” Soderbergh told me. “We both have this attitude of approaching it with a sense that you have a responsibility to the people who pay for these things to do what you say you’re going to do and do it efficiently.”

The success of Insomnia was what gave Nolan a shot at the resurrection of Warners’ Batman franchise. He centred his 15-minute pitch on creating a grittier engagement with reality, one in which the Batmobile and the body armour have a clear relationship to the commercial conversations in the Wayne Enterprises boardroom upstairs. Greg Silverman, president of creative development and worldwide production, recalls that Nolan wanted to base Batman’s technology on real physics and that he wanted viewers to see Bruce Wayne doing hung-over push-ups and recovering from bruises.

For Nolan, everything — the acting, the plot, the effects, the film technology, the sound — has to contribute to the weft of a film’s internal logic. “I have a faith that any audience can tell the difference between something that’s consistent to rules versus something that’s totally made up and anarchic.” Thus, the more reality he can bring in to undergird his unreality, the better he feels. Even if a scene ends with buildings crashing to earth like sand castles, it should start with a broad foothold in the recognisable.

Nolan goes out looking for technical challenges that help him establish the sorts of rules that comfort and tether an audience. He prefers, for example, to work on location rather than on set. He says he is inspired by “the claustrophobia, the restrictions involved in trying to make your story work in a real location, versus the anything-goes mentality on sets.”

His insistent realism extends even to the actors’ experiences. Nolan is “a magnificent problem solver,” McConaughey wrote to me via email. “It can be the biggest action sequence in the film and everyone can think it’s going to take two days to shoot, and before the smoke has cleared before lunch on the first day, he’s marching off to the next shot.”

Anne Hathaway remembered that while filming in Iceland, the set was shut down by a windstorm on a glacier. Nolan looked outside and said, “I don’t think it’s so bad,” as raw chunks of asphalt were being torn off the road in front of them.

On the set of The Dark Knight Rises, she had to stand on a scaffolding that was going to fall nine or 10 stories. Nolan reassured her. “It looks high, but it doesn’t get up to a really considerable speed.” Hathaway asked how he knew. “Well,” Nolan said, “I did it myself.”

 

FILM FACTS: interstellar

Physicist Kip Thorne, on whose findings of space travel the film is based, described the story as “based on warped space-time… the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans”.

Interstellar is 169 minutes long and has been made on a budget of $165 million. That means the film is worth $976,331.36 per minute!

The film has five Academy Award winners in the cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn and Matt Damon.

It was filmed under the fake name “Flora’s Letter”, after Nolan’s daughter Flora.

Nolan offered Irrfan Khan a role in the film, but Irrfan had to decline because he was busy promoting The Lunchbox.