In development for several years, Jonathan Nolan's original sci-fi tale Interstellar, which deals with time travel and wormholes and once looked close to being a Steven Spielberg movie, has now found a new director in the form of his immensely talented brother, Christopher Nolan.
The Hollywood Reporter claims the Inception director is in talks to produce and direct the "multi-layered" blockbuster, almost certainly as his next movie. It will be a joint venture between Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures and it's hinted that the deal would have been sewn up months ago but talks have been "very complex", likely to do with financial arrangements between the two studios. The ambitious plot of Interstellar, said to have been based on scientific theories by Caltech physicist and relativity expert Kip S. Thorne, revolves around the belief that wormholes not only exist but can be used for time travel. Much like Inception, the movie would revolve around a team on a mission, this time a group of explorers traveling through a wormhole into an alternative dimension. The movie would bring The Dark Knight trilogy director firmly back in the sci-fi genre which he dipped his toe into with The Prestige but in-keeping with the huge ambition of his recent productions. Chris Nolan's screenwriting brother Jonathan has proved the inspiration behind several of Chris' most celebrated works. He wrote the short story that Memento was based on, as well as co-writing the screenplays for The Prestige, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, the latter which could be involved in several Oscar nominations when they are announced later today. Regarding the source material for Interstellar, here's an extract from Kip Throne and his former grad student Michael Morris who theorised some twenty years ago that an unstable wormhole could be held open using negative mass; meaning one end of a wormhole could be accelerated to the point where it is of a higher velocity relative to the other, and then bringing it back - allowing it to be used for time travel;
It is argued that, if the laws of physics permit an advanced civilization to create and maintain a wormhole in space for interstellar travel, then that wormhole can be converted into a time machine with which causality might be violatable. Whether wormholes can be created and maintained entails deep, ill-understood issues about cosmic censorship, quantum gravity, and quantum field theory, including the question of whether field theory enforces an averaged version of the weak energy condition.