Timothée Chalamet recently reunited with Interstellar director Christopher Nolan at AMC Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles to screen the film in IMAX 70mm. In a video shared by Nolan Archives, the “Marty Supreme” Oscar nominee interviewed Nolan before the screening and declared “Interstellar” to be his personal favorite of his films.
“My role in ‘Interstellar’ isn’t that big, but I think I was 12th on the call sheet. This movie came to me at a time in my life, in my career, when things were certainly not set in stone,” Chalamet told the audience. “And this remains my favorite project I’ve ever been a part of. Of all the movies made in human history, this is the movie I’ve seen the most.”
Chalamet previously admitted that he “cried for an hour” after watching Interstellar for the first time and learning that Matthew McConaughey’s role as Cooper’s teenage son Tom had been significantly reduced. He told director Nolan before the screening that his expectations for his role were skewed from the beginning.
“This was a script that[Nolan’s brother Jonathan]wrote for Steven Spielberg,” Chalamet reminded the audience. “When I got the role, I Googled the project. The original story was about a father and son, so I thought, ‘Oh, I did it!'” And obviously they remade it and young Tom had a small role, but that’s fine. ”
Nolan interjected, “Never believe anything you read on the internet!”
As Chalamet and the audience laughed, director Nolan explained how the “genesis” of “Interstellar” began with a pitch from physicist Kip Thorne to Spielberg to “make a sci-fi movie that looks at the cosmos with real science in the background.”
“Shortly after we collaborated on The Dark Knight, my brother got a job and I started working with Stephen. I started calling him Stephen. He’s Mr. Spielberg to you,” Nolan told Chalamet. “He worked on it for years. He had a great idea and went through various iterations, but whatever it was, it never really hit its stride until Stephen was ready to make it. Stephen went off to make another movie, so it became available.”
Nolan continued, “I talked to Jonathan a lot over the years and talked about what he was doing and what his ambitions were. I was excited about it. I was incredibly struck by his first performance. I was working on the idea of time travel…watching time. I had a half-baked project that I hadn’t committed to, and when it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, “How would you feel if I combined this with some of my ideas and tried to change the image?” He was fine with that. He could see that the spirit of what I was trying to do was to get to what he was excited about in the first place. ”
“Interstellar” was released in theaters in November 2014 and grossed $681 million worldwide during its premiere, earning five Oscar nominations and winning Best Visual Effects. However, the film received far more mixed reviews than the praise Nolan received for his films The Dark Knight and Inception.
“You’re trying to be civil. This movie was received in a slightly ambivalent way,” Nolan told Chalamet when the actor tried to broach the subject of Interstellar’s rocky initial reception. “It was a little bit on the nose. There was some reaction from the critics that was a little on the nose, and there was a little bit of reaction from the audience, too. It made very good money, especially around the world. There was a sense that people weren’t good enough…It sounds selfish to say they weren’t ready…but from my perspective, they weren’t ready.”
“I had a producer anonymously say to me, ‘He’s a cold guy who makes cold movies,’ and then that stuck with me on a few projects,” the director continued. “The reason I was drawn to My Brother’s premiere is because it’s about family and humanity and it’s very emotional. That’s the movie I wanted to make. This is a movie with that heart.”
Chalamet told Nolan, “It kills me not to feel the love right away,” adding, “This movie makes me cry more than anything.”
“When you make a movie of that magnitude… every time you finish it and you screen it, there’s going to be someone who sheds tears and is deeply moved by it. That’s enough,” Nolan said. “You also can’t ask the culture to accept something right away. That’s asking too much in some ways. If you talk to people who were really involved with the film, you’ll see that it’s there. You’ve done your job. It’s all about the zeitgeist and where you fit into that zeitgeist.”
Director Nolan said he was “incredibly relieved and humbled” that Interstellar was a box office hit despite mixed reviews. But, he said, “this project seems to be moving people’s hearts and growing every year.”
“For years, people recognized me from somewhere and talked about ‘The Dark Knight,'” Nolan explained. “But in the last 10 years, it’s become ‘Interstellar,’ which is great. We re-released it two years ago and made $5 million. Its success is amazing. It’s incredibly rewarding. One of the strange things about directing is that you get so carried away with a project that the worst reaction is that people say, ‘Oh, it’s okay.’ it’s okay. ‘Rather, you’d think they’d either feel something and hate it intensely, or be passionately infatuated with it and fall in love. ”
Regardless of the initial mixed reviews, almost everyone would agree that the highlight of Interstellar is the scene where Cooper sees years of messages from his children as they grow up. Chalamet recorded scenes for the sequence.
“When we were filming Message from Home, there were certain things that were giving off a dark tone,” Nolan recalled. “It felt too heavy for me. I didn’t particularly like it. Once I told you about it, you just moved on and kept doing whatever you wanted to do. But I was like, ‘He knows what he wants to do and he has ideas.'” It wasn’t about being stubborn. You were planning what you wanted to do. You planned your choices and were not willing to abandon them on a casual whim for me. You wanted to test it, give it a try and see if I kept coming back, but I didn’t. I’m going to find that logic in the edit suite. ”
Watch Chalamet and Nolan’s full ‘Interstellar’ reunion conversation in the video below.
