Christopher Nolan and Interstellar
Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors and so anytime that I hear of a new project I am interested. I’m interested because he is one of the few mainstream directors who takes real chances. In a sea of remakes, zombie movies, movies described as the next xxx and even formulaic science fiction, fantasy and superhero movies it’s important to have a few people out there who do something different and whether you like what he has done or not it’s hard to say that he doesn’t take risks.
The most recent rumors are that Christopher Nolan is going to be directing a movie called Interstellar. I don’t know a lot about this yet, but it is reported to have time travel and alternate dimensions. These are two of my favorite story types and the second makes the first a lot easier to write by taking out most of the paradoxes and questions.
While I don’t know much more about the plot than that I know Christopher Nolan’s work reasonably well. So I feel comfortable in saying that if he does direct this movie he’s not simply going to take the easy path, because even when he did what could have easily been a typical superhero movie he took the risk of changing the tone.
This makes me hopeful that if he does direct Interstellar it’s not simply going to be an action movie, but something that makes people think. He might also be willing to take one of the major risks which time travel movies often fail to take which is showing that the ideas in it are actually complicated and that the answers aren’t simple. That time travel is interesting for more than simply visiting your parents or messing with history.
The parallel realities is one of the things that helps make this truly interesting for me though. I have always found that idea interesting anyway, but beyond that it means that the characters could go into the past, change things and return without actually having changed their own world, since the world they were in wasn’t theirs or at the very least still exists along with the other. It could also go into the concept of the infinite because Kip Thorne suggests that time travel could lead to infinite realities and once you begin to get into that concept you can go forever. Simply imagine anything that is possible but extremely unlikely, getting struck by lightning, winning the lottery, dating a supermodel. If there are infinite worlds then not only are all of those things possible but they have happened and far stranger things in one of those worlds. All this gives plenty of room for interesting stories.
Overall I don’t know all that much about this, but I always enjoy stories which let my imagination go and imagining the gritty style that Nolan often uses along with his willingness to take risks and ability to make ideas that seem odd work (such as playing the scenes in the movie in reverse) along with a movie that has wormholes, time travel, alternate dimensions and who knows what else. So here’s hoping that the great ideas we imagine are just the beginning of what has already been written.
