that those jaw dropping shots of black holes and wormholes are the most realistic depictions

of these phenomena man has ever created. Thanks to a $200 million budget only a proven blockbuster

filmmaker can command, Director Christopher Nolan’s team had the resources to create

impeccably detailed computer generated simulations of space-time events that had previously only

existed in highly complex equations. To achieve this task, Nolan’s visual effects director

Paul Franklin used the mathematical genius of leading astrophysicist Kip Thorne to generate

algorithms that guided the effects software. In fact, it was the astrophysicist himself

who conceptualized the film along with producer Lynda Obst, who Thorne worked with on 1997’s

Contact. Thorne’s passionate about explaining the mind-bending ideas of relativity to the

general public and was thrilled when he saw the final result. The visuals are so powerful,

so accurate, that Thorne’s planning on publishing two academic journal articles based on the

computer renderings of a black hole used in the film, which led to a new scientific discovery:

that light temporarily trapped around the black hole produced an unexpectedly complex

fingerprint pattern and a glowing accretion disk that appeared above, below, and in front

of the black hole. “I never expected that,” Thorne says, “it was just amazing.” No

one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually built one for the

film. Some of the single frames in these sequences of the film took 100 hours to render. The

entire movie is 800 terabytes of data. Another thing that makes a lot of the science behind

the film realistic is the script. Steven Spielberg, who was originally set to direct, hired Chris

Nolan’s brother, the screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, to write the movie. Nolan worked on

it for four years, even studying relativity at the California Institute of Technology

to learn the science. When Christopher Nolan took over as director, he emphasized the human

element of the picture and even codenamed the film “Flora’s Letter” because it’s

essentially a letter to his daughter, says star Jessica Chastain. To film the scenes

set on a dying, dusty Earth, the production planted a 500-acre cornfield in rural Alberta.

Then they burned it all down in a "manufactured apocalypse." Nolan was inspired by Stanley

Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey in many ways, including “the one powerful Image”

idea, which led to Nolan’s ambitious use of longer shots. Like Nolan’s batman trilogy

before it, Interstellar is shot on 70mm Imax film and is - according to the director - “all

about the theatrical experience, getting audiences to see it as an experience in the theatre

with other people.” That’s why the movie will open to the widest ever release for a

film, in 760 Imax theatres around the planet. Thanks for watching. Share this video if you

thought it was interesting and make sure you subscribe to The Daily Conversation for our

next informative, daily video. Click on the screen to check out our video running down

the most promising energy sources of the future and interesting facts about the last highly

successful space-themed film, Gravity.