20 Things You Didn't Know About Interstellar
The movie that made China and George R.R. Martin MASSIVE Christopher Nolan fanboys.
It's no secret that Christopher Nolan is a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It's a movie that greatly inspired him while growing up, and his career wouldn't have been the same without such a formative cinematic experience in his youth.
As such, it was inevitable that Nolan's filmography would, at some point, feature a movie that felt like a close relative of Kubrick's classic - and in 2014, that relative arrived, in the form of sci-fi epic Interstellar.
Though Interstellar often falls outside the uppermost tier of Nolan rankings (alongside The Prestige, Inception, and The Dark Knight), there's no denying it's a visually-stunning, thought-provoking, and mesmerising experience, and those who saw it on a gigantic IMAX screen will attest there hasn't been anything like it in years.
From a production standpoint, it's also one of Nolan's most complicated projects to date, demanding a keen focus on scientific accuracy, as well as some gruelling on-location shoots in cold, unforgiving environments.
So, while we wait for that atomic bomb movie Nolan is currently working on, let's unpack some interesting details you may not've known about Interstellar...
20. Some Individual Frames Took 100 Hours To Render
Nolan and his team of filmmakers and experts (including renowned theoretical physicist Kip Thorne) wanted Interstellar to be as scientifically-accurate as possible, especially when it came to depicting wormholes and black holes.
And - to simplify things greatly - this meant that the movie's special effects were pretty darn complicated to produce.
But how complicated exactly? Well, visual effects house Double Negative had to develop new rendering software based on Thorne's equations, and overall, it took a ridiculous amount of time to develop the movie's 850 effects-laden shots.
In fact, some individual frames took a staggering 100 hours to render, with the film clocking in at 800 terabytes of data by the time it was completed.
Movies commonly run at 24 frames-per-second, so, potentially, Interstellar could've required 2,400 hours to render one second of footage. Mad.