Christopher Nolan breaks down the shocking twist in ‘Interstellar’
Any fan of contemporary cinema will know the cinematic power of British filmmaker Christopher Nolan, a director known for his extraordinary science fiction tales that explore the outer reaches of human exploration and the psychological quandaries that keep us awake at night. With Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky no longer around to tell similar stories, it is Nolan’s job, along with Denis Villeneuve and George Miller, to pick up this mantle.
Nolan’s cinematic ambition was showcased for all to see in the 2014 movie Interstellar, a spectacular sci-fi romance starring Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Timothée Chalamet, Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway. Telling the story of a group of explorers who travel through a wormhole in space in an attempt to save the future of humanity from collapse, Nolan’s film is his own 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After being treated to a host of dazzling visuals, Nolan’s final trick in his 2014 film is a stunning narrative twist that few can say they honestly saw coming. Lured to a specific planet after being fed promising data, the cosmic expedition team Endurance is met with a dark reminder of human selfishness as they arrive, finding only Matt Damon’s Mann, who faked the promising date just so that he could be saved.
Mann’s motivations were further laid out in Interstellar’s prequel comic written by Nolan, who explained himself further in an interview with The Daily Beast. “It’s very straightforward: selfishness and cowardice,” Nolan said of Mann’s motivations and the film’s shocking twist. Continuing, he explains:
Adding: “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 rationalisation of it is extraordinary—the way he was able to rationalise his own cowardice into a positive thing. Loneliness and desperation will make us do crazy things”.
Indeed, many of Nolan’s films are concerned with the relationship between selfish desire and collective human endeavour. This is explored brilliantly in his 2017 film Dunkirk and even in his time-bending sci-fi Tenet in 2020. While Interstellar was born from Nolan’s own interest in this field, the idea was also fostered by John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
“It’s weirdly logical but appallingly selfish,” he added, regarding Damon’s Mann character: “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…when he’s confronted by the bleak reality of just dying out there alone, it all starts to unravel”.
Though Nolan was more than happy to break down the twist, he wasn’t too keen to reveal the secrets of the film’s ending, concluding his thoughts by stating, “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”.
