Interstellar has become one of Christopher Nolan’s most enduring films, but it was almost made by another director altogether.
The Inception director released his epic, starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, in 2016. While it became a box office success at the time, in recent years, it has remained a regular fixture in IMAX screens, with Nolan himself saying it’s the film of his that most people want to talk to him about.
But filmmaking maestro Steven Spielberg has revealed he was originally attached to direct Interstellar – and was the one who hired Nolan’s brother Jonathan to write it in the first instance. He admitted in a new interview: “Interstellar was a much better movie in Chris Nolan’s hands than it would have been in mine.”
The Minority Report director told Empire (via Total Film). “I was involved with Interstellar for a year and I became fascinated with it.”
”I spent a lot of time at the [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] in Pasadena, California, talking to the scientists there and the aerospace engineers.”
He continued: “I actually hired Chris Nolan’s brother to write the first and second draft for me, but it didn’t stick.
Spielberg, whose new film Disclosure Day is released in June, recalled Jonathan telling him: “If there comes a point where you decide not to make this movie, I can tell you who’s gonna grab it. He’s already bugging me about it. And that’s my brother Chris.”
Sure enough, “he was absolutely right”, and “the second” Spielberg decided not to make it, “Chris jumped on board, probably the next day”.
Interstellar stars McConaughey as an astronaut who leaves his young daughter behind to embark on a mission that will save Earth, which is on the verge of collapse.
Nolan recently opened up about why he was initially drawn to his brother’s script. “The reason I was attracted to my brother’s first act is because it’s about family and humanity, and it’s deeply emotional,” he said during a special screening hosted by himself and Timothée Chalamet, who has an early role in the film. “That’s the film I wanted to make. It’s a film that wears its heart on its sleeve.”
The director said the film “moved through all these different iterations” under Spielberg’s guidance, and admitted he’d had “a lot of conversations” with Jonathan “over the years” about “what his ambition was”.
“I was excited by it. I had been working on a time travel idea – things looking at time. I had half-baked projects that I hadn’t committed to. When it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, ‘How would you feel if I took this and tried to combine it with some of my ideas and change a bit with what it was?’ He was fine with it. He could tell the spirit of what I was trying to do was to get to what he was initially excited about it.”
During Interstellar’s 10th anniversary re-release in 2026, Nolan reflected on the film’s enduring success in IMAX cinemas. At the time of its release, Paramount was focused on making its films digitally, but granted Nolan special dispensation to shoot and release the film in IMAX.
“I was just so gratified by the response,” Nolan said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “It’s really thrilling when people respond to your work at any point. But 10 years later, to have new audiences coming and experiencing it in the way that we’d originally intended it on the big IMAX screens and in particular on those IMAX film prints? It’s really rewarding to see that it continues to have a life.”
The film is currently the ninth biggest IMAX release of all time.
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