**SPOILERS AHEAD** No, we still don’t know what happened to the spinning top at the end of "Inception," and if you’re expecting Christopher Nolan to dish about what he believes lay ahead for Coop (Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) at the end of "Interstellar"… well, he’s not telling you.
“No way, man!” he tells The Daily Beast. “You’re just going to have to go back and see it again. It’s there for you to make what you make of it. People do always have radically different interpretations of things I put in there, but I know what I think and I don’t like it to have any more validity than the experience you have watching it.”
And we certainly won’t argue with that —for all the complaints that Nolan’s films have too much exposition, it’s ironic that the director is asked continually to explain his movies. And so it goes for the film’s appearance of Matt Damon, playing the duplicitous Dr. Mann, who tries to leave Coop for dead and make a selfish escape back to a more habitable colony. But Nolan explains his motivations for this sequence.
“It’s very straightforward: selfishness and cowardice,” Nolan says. “It’s very human, and I love what Matt did with that; he found the reality of it. It’s the kind of sequence where you loathe the guy because he’s doing something that you feel you might wind up doing in a similar situation. It’s very logical, but the rationalization of it is extraordinary —the way he was able to rationalize his own cowardice into a positive thing. Loneliness and desperation will make us do crazy things.”
Pointing towards classics "The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre" and Erich von Stroheim‘s "Greed" as inspirations of movies that highlight humanity operating at the most base possible level, Nolan sees Mann acting in the same manner as the characters in those films.
“He’s not exactly crazy,” the director says. “It’s weirdly logical, but appallingly selfish. The only outcome to the mission for him was [a colony]. I think, and it’s something we talked a lot about —and it’s something he says in the film— that there was no doubt in his mind that his was going to be the planet, his was going to be the mission. So whatever the risks, he felt very confident. And when he’s confronted by the bleak reality of just dying out there alone, it all starts to unravel.”
So, do you roll with Nolan’s explanation? Or does it still leave you with narrative issues? Weigh in below.