Oppenheimer may have become the highest-grossing biopic of all timeand the Dark Knight trilogy may have made Christopher Nolan a household name, but Interstellar is a strong contender for the director's best picture simply because it has more emotional core than any of his other projects. By now, it's pretty well documented that Interstellar is somewhat of an outlier among Nolan's filmography in that regard. But the more you think about it, the more impressive it becomes.

The massive, galaxy-spanning space epic that actually sends a man into the singularity of a black hole during its climax also manages to be the most heartfelt and intimate portrait of human connection that Nolan has ever created. That strange complementary dichotomy extends to other areas of the film. Just think how committed Nolan was to scientific realism and how fantastical the events in the film are. This is a film that not only depicts a surreal journey over the event horizon of a black hole, but also a planet of eternal tsunamis. And yet, instead of relying on his own creative ideas for these strange moments, Nolan stuck closely to science in order to observe such seemingly fantastic moments.

It's really just a testament to the underlying weirdness of extraterrestrial reality, but it's also another fascinating layer to Nolan's best film. Like this: Nolan was so adamant that his sci-fi epic adhere to scientific principles that he hired physicist Kip Thorne to provide as much. But when it came to the final journey into the heart of the black hole, the director gave himself license to get as weird as possible, not only veering away from science into full-on sci-fi, but also trying to emulate a genre classic in the process.

The fact is that no one has ever experienced what it's like to cross the event horizon of a black hole. Even while physicists are pretty clear about what might happen if humans approach this mysterious cosmological limit (it involves something called "spaghettiification," which is a lot less fun than it sounds), there's no real first-hand evidence. hand about what the experience would be like. So when Joseph Cooper, aka "Coop" (Matthew McConaughey) makes his journey across Gargantua's event horizon in Interstellar, Christopher Nolan was able to take at least some artistic license.

After relying on the exhaustive knowledge of Nobel laureate theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to inform most of the film's depiction of space and its various quirks, Nolan found himself with some freedom to be creative. Instead of going completely off-book, however, the director substituted actual physics for the legendary ending of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as his guide.

Nolan has never made a secret of how indebted he and Interstellar are to Kubrick's film, but instead of simply taking cues from 2001 for this climax, he actually wanted to recreate the specific feel of Kubrick's original. As 2001 draws to a close, Keir Dulea's David Bowman enters a Stargate that sends him on a surreal journey through time where, after witnessing a psychedelic light show, Bowman encounters older versions of his pre-film self to end on the famous last shot of an embryo floating above the Earth. While much has since been written about what this bizarre journey is supposed to mean, it's safe to say that Kubrick kept things deliberately mysterious in that regard. That's what Nolan clearly wanted to fully recreate with Coop's journey through the event horizon.

Interstellar was inspired by specific childhood experiencesnamely Christopher Nolan watching Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. Of the two, Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi epic was perhaps the most influential on the director, and certainly on Interstellar. But even beyond his influence on that film, Nolan proved his undying appreciation for Kubrick's work elsewhere, overseeing the 70mm restoration of "2001" along with the film's 4K re-release in 2018. He even went so far as to say that Kids Should Watch 2001 because it is fundamental to his understanding of cinema.

So profound was 2001's influence on Interstellar that it seems Nolan not only wanted to emulate the film's science-informed aesthetic and overall tone, but he also wanted to achieve a very specific goal: recreate the mysterious final scenes of the movie. . During an appearance by Neil deGrasse Tyson "Star Talk" podcast, Kip Thorne once revealed that Nolan told him the same thing during production, saying, "Chris told me early on that he would like to make a movie where the ending is as mysterious as the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey." Expanding on his experience, Thorne revealed that Nolan was quite protective of the ending and its 2001-inspired mystery, only allowing it to be explained in Thorne's own book, The Science of Interstellar. In your own words:

"(Nolan) really admires Stanley Kubrick and that movie and so a little later when we were talking about the ending, and we had a lot of conversations about the ending, he said, 'Well, you can explain the ending in this book that I'm planning to write.' . (...) He identified it as the place where the end would be explained."