20 Things You Didn't Know About Interstellar

15. The Original Ending Was "Much More Straightforward"

Interstellar Fourth Dimension
Warner Bros. Pictures

The idea for Interstellar was first conceived in the late 2000s, at which point the great Steven Spielberg came close to directing.

Around this same time, Jonathan Nolan - brother of Chris, and collaborator on many of his movies - was tapped to write the script. Then, when Spielberg dropped out, Jonathan pushed for his older sibling to assume directorial duties, leading to the version of Interstellar we all know today.

Understandably though, this final version is a lot different from the version that Jonathan originally wrote, and some of the biggest changes can be found in the ending of the film.

In 2015, Jonathan explained that his original ending was "much more straightforward". It would've seen a wormhole collapse on Cooper, presumably eliminating the tesseract scene found in the final version, as well as Cooper's reunion with an elderly Murph.

A much darker conclusion by the sounds of it, but possibly a lot easier for audiences to wrap their minds around!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!