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 In his daughter, he found inspiration for a lead character in
"Interstellar," Nolan's big-budget epic space adventure rooted
in intimate family drama.
"I took the decision to change Murphy into a girl, and I think I
may well have done that because my oldest child is a daughter,"
Nolan said of the teen who suffers when her father, played by
Matthew McConaughey, leaves for a long, potentially fatal space
journey.
"I wanted to have as close a relationship as possible to the
emotional journey of the character."
"Interstellar," out in U.S. theaters on Friday, is expected to
be one of the year's biggest films at the box office. And Nolan,
who has carved out a prestigious movie career with the "Dark
Knight" Batman trilogy and "Inception," believes it takes the
audience to the furthest realm of space exploration in film.
After Alfonso Cuaron's space thriller "Gravity" drew some
criticism from scientists for its implausibility, Nolan
pre-empts controversy by saying anyone who demands scientific
rigor from the fantastical film is "going to produce their own
level of frustration." The film presents theoretical notions of
wormholes and bending the rules of time and space.
"We've certainly crossed over into some interesting territory in
terms of the science, but we've always done it at the service of
the emotional story at the heart of the film."
"Interstellar" is set in a vague distant future where Earth's
inhabitants face an agricultural crisis as dust storms threaten
mankind's food and ability to breathe.
McConaughey, fresh off his best actor Oscar win, plays the
"everyman" Cooper, a former NASA pilot-turned-farmer who is
called to an exploration to find a new home for humans on
another world in another galaxy.
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To do so, Cooper must leave behind his family, especially his
precocious teen daughter, played by Mackenzie Foy, with whom he
shares a close bond over astrophysics.
"The hero is stereotypically much more considerate than everybody
else. And that's fine, that can also be boring," McConaughey said.
"I spent a lot of my time trying to really shine a light and
understand (Cooper's) faults."
The film reunites previous Nolan collaborators Michael Caine and
Anne Hathaway, who play father-daughter astrophysicists, the Brands.
It also stars Jessica Chastain as the adult Murphy.
"She's the one who suffered a great loss, her whole world in a way,"
Chastain said. "She feels lied to and she feels betrayed and she
feels abandoned."
"Interstellar," made by Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures, Time Warner
Inc's Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures for $165 million, is
projected by BoxOffice.com to open with $72 million.
For Nolan, who was inspired by films such as Stanley Kubrick's 1968
"2001: A Space Odyssey," the sci-fi genre was missing the element of
optimism.
"That optimism and hope is essential to the journey that then
results in the expedition that they go on to, and that can only be
done by people with a great sense of spirit," he said.
(Editing by Mary Milliken and James Dalgleish)
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