CraveOnline: Well, there’s one point where you do stop and talk about theory for a bit, and I was curious if there was scientific study about it: love as a quantifiable scientific force. Is that purely metaphor or is there any research being done into this?
Jonathan Nolan: I think it functions within the film in both ways. It’s deployed as a metaphor to some degree, but I think the idea that our feelings mean something, that there’s a mystery here… I mean, one of the things that we came across, one of the things I was left with having spent the better part of a decade working with some of the very best scientists in the world, the best scientists in the world, talking to them about the theories in the film and then taking from those conversations this idea of grounding it, is there’s an awful lot we don’t know. And the spaces in which we don’t fully understand our experience, you could drive a spaceship through. You know?
There’s an awful lot about the shape of our universe that is left for us to discover, and what’s also interesting is, at any given moment along that voyage there have always been naysayers. There have always been people looking at it and sneering at the idea of, for instance, quantum entanglement, exotic materials, all these sorts of things. They don’t fit within both our practical understanding of the universe or the Newtonian take on the universe. Right? And yet we’re in a moment in which both of those things [are] now demonstrable, and very counterintuitive to human experience.
So, still plenty of room left for speculation within those spaces, and I think the idea that familial love is a feature of natural selection, as sort of an endowment of creatures through time… there is a bit of a mystery to humanity on that level. But it is, in a sense, a metaphorical sense, a very real phenomenon. We have gifted, all of us, our thoughts, insights and discoveries from one generation to the next. That hasn’t always been the case. You have these collapses of societal order where all of that knowledge, it just gets pissed away. The moment in which we do choose to gift those ideas and those thoughts to the next generation, there’s no reason for us to do so. In a very real way that generation that’s coming up, that’s coming along, they are competing for resources with us.
So there is a bit of a… it’s one thing to ascribe it to natural selection, absolutely, but there is something very interesting that’s going on and I think that’s one of the things we were interested in asking a question about.
I realize this might be a big can of worms, but again, you talk about wanting to ground the film in real science – as real as we know – and yet when we come along the path of time travel the film does enter into an ontological paradox. Is that supportable by what we think now about the possibilities of time travel, or is that a dramatic construct?
Define the ontological paradoxes that you’re observing in the film.
Okay: Coop goes into the black hole and sends back information that sends Coop into space to go into the black hole [in the first place]. He wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
Yes.
That’s on what the story essentially relies, in some respects, in order to move forward at the beginning. Is that not an ontological paradox? Is my terminology off?
Whether or not it’s an ontological paradox, it is a completely valid exploration of one form of time travel. If you read Kip Thorne’s books, specifically Black Holes and Time Warps, he talks the paradox of time travel, which we spent an awful lot of time thinking about, and at various stages engaging with different modes within the script. Kip’s had a famous and long-running series of arguments about the nature of black holes, but also the nature of time warps. One probably more relevant observation of the film is that the fact that a wormhole itself is almost certainly impossible, right?
Yeah.
And yet without one, we’re fucked! Certainly in this generation. If anything came along that threatened this generation, we don’t have the capacity or the tools to get anywhere. So the appearance of a wormhole, interestingly within the film, suggests [one] thing immediately, which is important. It suggests the existence of an extra-dimensional intelligence, right? Meaning, an intelligence that has learned how to manipulate gravity on a quantum level. Have you had the chance to read Kip’s book about the film?
No, I apologize. Clearly I should have.
If you’re interested in those questions that’s a great book to dive into. Kip is an absolute rock star in physics but probably one of the world’s foremost experts in an imaginary phenomena, which is the wormhole, which Kip believes [is] probably an impossibility absent a certain model for the physical universe, the one that we deploy in the film, and absent an extra-dimensional intelligence that can seed a wormhole, essentially with exotic material. Right?
The film doesn’t have an opportunity to stop… believe me, my first draft was probably 250 pages long. The film doesn’t have an opportunity to slow down and try to articulate all the stops along the way. Kip’s book does a great job of filling in some of the gaps. But the idea of wormholes and the time travel paradoxes that would be created by wormholes, there’s a great graphical illustration within Kip’s book that you’d enjoy, which articulates the paradox of a wormhole and the time travel paradoxes that might be created by a wormhole. We’ve worked within those models.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
