--- title: Watch: Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne on the Physics of Interstellar description: From space travel to moving beyond the speed of light: the challenges and lessons learned when making a movie that pushes boundaries. canonical: https://time.com/3602525/christopher-nolan-physics-interstellar-kip-thorne/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-11-24T18:36:27.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-01T09:02:08.214Z article:section: Science og:title: Interstellar Director on The Science Behind The Movie og:description: From space travel to moving beyond the speed of light: the challenges and lessons learned when making a movie that pushes boundaries. og:url: https://time.com/3602525/christopher-nolan-physics-interstellar-kip-thorne/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt36426df2926ba29d/6987632155a859f607a837a0/interstellar.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2100 og:image:height: 1181 og:image:alt: INTERSTELLAR og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Interstellar Director on The Science Behind The Movie twitter:description: From space travel to moving beyond the speed of light: the challenges and lessons learned when making a movie that pushes boundaries. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt36426df2926ba29d/6987632155a859f607a837a0/interstellar.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Watch Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne Discuss the Physics of _Interstellar_ > Sponsored content. 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Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-futureproof-2026q3/newsletters?i=c50b5d22-b1d7-4dc7-bcaa-6ab76b0a42ef&cr=time-nl-futureproof-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne Discuss the Physics of Interstellar [Watch (HLS stream): Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne Discuss the Physics of Interstellar](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/JxzxbgGx.m3u8) (10:28)  _Published 2014-11-24. Director Christopher Nolan and author Kip Thorne speak to TIME's Jeffrey Kluger about the physics of 2014 blockbuster Interstellar_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Nov 24, 2014 6:36 PM UTC  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Nov 24, 2014 6:36 PM UTC There’s no arguing about the blockbuster status of _Interstellar_, director Chris Nolan’s latest box office phenomenon. But plenty of people are debating the science component of that sci-fi tale—which is how it always is when a movie based in something as non-negotiable as physics has to take just enough liberties to make the fiction part of the story fly. Nolan was determined to keep his narrative scientifically honest, which is why he signed on as technical adviser celebrated Caltech physicist Kip Thorne—who literally wrote the book on (much of) the movie’s cosmology. TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger sat down with Nolan and Thorne to talk about human curiosity, the art of sci-fi filmmaking and the one time the two of them locked horns over a plot point. ## Transcript Interstellar is the year's biggest movie. Partly because of the solid science behind the science fiction. We're going to speak to director Chris Nolan and physicist Kip Thorne who literally wrote the book on some of the physics behind the film about how that science operates. [ MUSIC ] This was a tragedy. It's been telling us to leave for a while now. [ MUSIC ] Your daughter's generation will be the last to survive on Earth. So here we have the scientist and the artist. And we're working to conflate these two worlds. So the question I wanna ask is. What is the greatest liberty that you felt you had to take with the science in this movie and what is the greatest veto you ever had to impose when you said you've gone too far with this? Well the greatest veto is the easiest thing. Chris, Chris and I brain storm about the science every few weeks while he was working on the screen play. And on several occasions he said I need this. I want this. And I'd respond, I don't think that can work. And he would say go think about it. And I'd go home [ INAUDIBLE ] [ LAUGH ] I think I said please. On one item you said it's not negotiable. But I, but I would go home and sleep on it. Think about it. And I always found a way. Except once. And Jonah, his brother, had told me, this is near and dear to Chris's heart. [ LAUGH ] And he really wants this. And I said, no, it won't fly. There's no way. The laws of physics forbid that. Yeah. [ LAUGH ] And we went back and forth for two weeks and finally he threw in the towel. What Kip's referred to, is I. Had wanted an element of the story where people travel faster than the speed of light. Right. And it was, it was something that was pretty important. Right. And he, and he made it very clear over a fairly long period of time that that is not possible. [ LAUGH ] But I. But one of the things and I, I haven't asked you about this since, but you know, after that two weeks of arguing about what finally felt like I gained some understanding of. Right. Relativity, you know, which is what [ INAUDIBLE ] great pains to explain to me in the relationship between time and gravity and [ INAUDIBLE ] and everything. And I sort of got this intuitive sense of, okay, I kind of get why it's not possible. Right. And then. I said yeah, that it's not possible. And then you immediately said to me something like oh in localized regions. Or something I'm like okay. Well I'll give you it, an example for violates the speed limit. The universe after, right when it started expands faster than the speed of light. The distant region, distantly separated regions. That can't communicate with each other are moving faster than the speed of light relative to each other. And it's the speed limit really only applies when you're in a region that is so small that the warping of space and time, isn't important. Did you Chris, come in to this movie. Innately prexistingly interested in this kind of hard head cracking cosmological physics and Kip did you come into this prexistingly interested in the artistry of the science? Yeah I mean to take, to take my end of it one of the things that's become really apparent to me in making this film and then showing it to people or whatever is that. Everything that I know about physics, cosmological physics and all of this, I learned when I was ten year old. I mean and really through watching Carl Sagan's you know, Cosmos. You know in the, after Star Wars came out. Right. Everything was about space. The space shuttle went up for the first time late 70s, the early 80s, all that. And I realized that when you're that age. That excitement. Mm hm. And your brain is very willing to absorb these ideas which I never really thought, I've never really had such a powerful example in my life of the value of early education. Right. Or the value of trying to excite somebody about something that, that early on and, and one the things I'm pleased about with the, the film is you never really try to make it accessible to you know, younger kids. You know, 12 year olds, 10 year olds whatever because I, I think. Exciting people's imagination at that age. Right. You know, I came into this project really with a fair amount of you know, laymen's knowledge if you like about black holes and things like that, but really from when I was 10 years old. Right. You have very deep intuition - >> Mm hm. That I didn't see so much in [ UNKNOWN ]. And I don't know where it comes from, maybe it's from your 10- year- old experiences, but, but you, you see somehow intuitively things that that non- scientists rarely see. And you would see things that I didn't see, because you had a more open mind I guess. But this intuitive sense, for a scientist this kind of intuition is. Absolutely essential if you want to leap over, across the the boundaries of, of human knowledge and make guesses and then test those guesses. You, you have to have inspiration and intuition of a sort that you, you have, Einstein had. I have some of. But it is so important for a scientist and it's so wonderful to see it in the artist. Yeah, that's one of my old textbooks. She always loved the pictures. It's an old federal textbook. We've replaced them with the corrected versions. Corrected? Explaining how the Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union. You keep talking about your feelings. So having to feel something, to kind of actually narrate ,. Which I, I find very reassuring. Yeah. Really. Cuz it's, I mean, maybe it's just cuz from a side of it that I come from, but it sorta feels to me like the, for something to be true. Yeah. There ought to be an element of feeling and intuition. Right. It shouldn't just be hard math. Right. I can't just be the calculus. It has to be the visceral. It feels like it, doesn't it? Yeah. It feels right. But do you worry at all. That some of this will be misunderstood. In other words, again without spoiling anything. Some remarkable eye popping things happen in the third act of the movie. And, you know they may not necessarily move along the lines of the literal, but they do move within the worlds that physics allows. Do you worry at all the people will come away and, as with Star Trek say, you know, so warp drive is possible? Even though that's not in this movie. That? Well I think, you know, no one's sort of sitting around the film and saying everything in this film is perfect and accurate and known science. Because the great thing about the scientific method and what I, I really. It was sort of thrilling to watch Kit. Yeah. You know, question himself and his, his own things. It was, you know, science seeking to disprove itself. Right. Just, that literally being the scientific method. Cuz I would ask him things that I read in his, I got from his book. Mm- hm. About, you know, black holes leap, possibly a naked, sinking artist, those kind of things. RIght. That I wanted to work into the kind of idea of the narritive. And I would put these things to Kip, and he would, he would start arguing with me about them and say, well, we don't know this. We don't know that, but I got it from your book. THis is stuff you wrote. So yeah, but doesn't matter. You've still gotta do the calculations, so we're gonna look at other papers that have come out in the years since to see what the current, current thinking is. And I I found that kind of objectivity. Thrilling. I mean that's what you wish was, were in every aspect of our civilization. Well, being, being a physicist working in an area which is much cleaner in terms of being able to determine whether you're right or wrong, it's a very humbling process because every day you believe something and then discover you were wrong every day [ LAUGH ]. Now, taking sort of the 30, 000 foot view, and, and, Chris, you and I spoke about this once before, Kim, you and I haven't ,. Science that's this head- crackingly difficult is hard to get people interested in, and, you know, if this were, we were having discussions about biology, which actually affects the lives of people. Their very health, you couldn't necessarily get them as interested in, in the science as you do when it's cosmology. Even though it has no direct bearing on their lives. What is it about cosmology that though, though it's so not immediately relevant, nonetheless becomes primally, viscerally relevant to people? You know, I think this says something about the human brain actually. Mm- hm. There's a deep intellectual curiosity in the human brain wanting to know about the universe around us. Right. The skies. The heavens. The what you've heard the mysteries relativity. Right? Right. And people are just intellectually curious Yeah. You know, when I, when I ask myself what are the great things looking back in history that we got from the era of the Renaissance. It's the great art, the great music, the science insights of Leonardo da Vinci who is- Right. When you ask what are the great things, 200 years from now, what are the great things that came from this era. I think there's going to be an understanding of the universe around us. This is culture. Right. And it's culture that the human mind and spirit embrace. And I think that's what makes this movie fly. And part of it, what I think you're getting at, which I actually found relavatory speaking with Kipp, just talking with him over the months, is. You know you take a field like economics for example. Right. Deal with really material things. You know, what ever you can't predict anything. It's completely always wrong. [ LAUGH ] But you take Kipsfield where its all, to us outsiders particularly, it's all abstractions. It's all algebra. It's all thought experiments. Things that don't seem to bear any relation to our real lives. But, you know, the GPS on your phone only works because of this work. It has actual impact on your life, you know materially, to do, you know, to do with the clocking of satellites and difference in their clock based on relativity. So, it's, it's this very weird [ INAUDIBLE ] between. You know, it's almost as if you're dealing with pure philosophy, not abstract philosophy. But then it makes your cell phone work. Right. [ LAUGH ] It's pretty, it's pretty incredible. It's like grand unified theory all over again, macro and micro. Yeah. Put it all together. Well I thank you gentlemen. I thank you for the time. I would do this all day if we had the studio time but I really appreciate you coming here today. Thank you. 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