Christopher Nolan‘s "Interstellar" lands on home video today, and it comes loaded with all kinds of special features (check out over 90 minutes of them right here). It will give you another chance to asses the director’s flawed but ambitious sci-fi film, and according to Nolan, maybe this time around the knotty science of the picture will be a bit more clear, especially since he didn’t expect you to take it all in the first time.
“ ‘Inception’ dealt a lot in ambiguities, I think ‘Interstellar’ less so, but you don’t know," he told Allocine about the reaction to his film. "There are all kinds of complexities in ‘Interstellar’ that the audience is certainly not intended to analyze or parse on one viewing. But a lot of that relates to the science of it, and why things are happening.” But he makes it clear that he isn’t just providing cloudy narratives for the sake of it, and that there is a guiding principle to his approach.
“The way I work is I have to know exactly what it is that’s going on, as far I’m concerned. I have to have a very strong rule set," Nolan explained. "I have to know exactly how everything adds up. But that doesn’t mean other interpretations aren’t valid. It doesn’t mean you can’t be ambiguous and layered about things. So I try to make films where I know what they mean, so we’re not cheating [and] it’s not ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake, things aren’t just left unanswered. I know what it means, but the idea is that my interpretation isn’t any more valid than your interpretation.”
And frankly, that’s a smart way to work, allowing audiences to bring their own experiences and emotions to a story, and letting them fill in their own blanks, even if it doesn’t necessarily match what it all means for the filmmaker.
Check out the brief talk with Nolan below, followed by a conversation with Jonathan Nolan and Kip Thorne with the folks at Schmoes Know.