Timothée Chalamet recently reunited with his “Interstellar” director Christopher Nolan at the AMC Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles to screen the film in Imax 70mm. In video shared by the Nolan Archives, the “Marty Supreme” Oscar nominee interviewed Nolan ahead of the screening and declared “Interstellar” his personal favorite among his own films.
“Though my role is not enormous in ‘Interstellar,’ I think I was number 12 on the call sheet, this film came to me at a time in life, in my career, where things were certainly not set yet,” Chalamet told the audience. “And it’s remained my favorite project I’ve ever been in. It’s the film I’ve seen the most of, of all the films ever made in human history.”
Chalamet has previously admitted he “wept for an hour” after watching “Interstellar” for the first time and discovering his role as Tom, the teenage son of Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, had been drastically cut down. He told Nolan ahead of the screening his expectations for his role were distorted from the beginning.
“This was a script [Nolan’s brother Jonathan] wrote for Steven Spielberg,” Chalamet reminded the audience. “When I got the part, I googled the project. The original story was about a father and his son, so I thought, ‘Oh man, I made it!’ And then obviously they reworked it and young Tom was a smaller part, but that’s okay.”
Nolan interjected, “Never believe what you read online!”
As Chalamet and the audience laughed, Nolan explained how “the genesis” of “Interstellar” started as a pitch from physicist Kip Thorne to Spielberg about “doing a science fiction movie about looking out into the greater universe with real science behind it.”
“Right after we collaborated on ‘Dark Knight,’ my brother got the job and went to work with Steven. I get to call him Steven. He’s Mr. Spielberg to you,” Nolan told Chalamet. “He worked on it for a lot of years. It had incredible ideas and moved through all these different iterations, but until Steven was ready to make it, whatever it is, it never quite got that momentum. Steven went off to do another film so it became available.”
Nolan continued, “I had a lot of conversations with Jonathan over the years and what he was doing and what his ambitions was. I was excited by it. I was incredibly struck by his first act. I had been working on a time travel idea… things looking at time. I had half-baked projects that I hadn’t committed to. When it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, ‘How would you feel if I took this and tried to combine it with some of my ideas and change a bit with what it was?’ He was fine with it. He could tell the spirit of what I was trying to do was to get to what he was initially excited about it.”
“Interstellar” opened in theaters in November 2014 and grossed $681 million worldwide during its initial run and scored five Oscar nominations, winning for best visual effects. But reviews for the movie were far more mixed compared to the praise Nolan had received for his “Dark Knight” movies and “Inception.”
“You’re trying to be polite. The film was received in a slightly ambiguous way,” Nolan told Chalamet as the actor tried to broach the topic of “Interstellar’s” rocky initial reception. “It was a little bit sniffy. Some of the responses were a bit sniffy from critics and a little from audiences. It made very good money around the world, particularly. There was a sense of people not quite being… it sounds egotistical to say they weren’t ready… but they weren’t ready for it from me”
“I had some producer anonymously say of me, ‘He is a cold guy who makes cold films.’ Then it sort of stuck on me for several projects,” the director continued. “The reason I was attracted to my brother’s first act is because it’s about family and humanity and it’s deeply emotional. That’s the film I wanted to make. It’s a film that wears its heart on its sleeve.”
Chalamet told Nolan that “it kills me you didn’t feel that love right away,” adding: “This movie makes me weep more than anything.”
“When you make a film on that scale… every screening we did as we were finishing the film, there would be somebody who would be in tears and deeply moved by it. That’s enough,” Nolan said. “You can’t also ask the culture to immediately embrace something. It’s asking too much in a way. If you talk to individuals who’ve connected with the film in a really profound way, then you know it’s there. You’ve done your job. The rest is about the zeitgeist and where you fit in with it.”
Nolan said that it was “an incredible relief and a humbling thing” when “Interstellar” proved a hit at the box office even with mixed reviews. But “the project seems to touch people more and more year after year and sort of grows,” he noted.
“For years, people would recognize me somewhere and talk about ‘Dark Knight,’” Nolan explained. “But over the last 10 years it’s become ‘Interstellar.’ It’s a wonderful thing. We re-released it two years ago and it made $5 million. It’s amazing the success it’s had. It’s incredibly rewarding. One of the strange things about directing is you immerse yourself in an obsessive way with a project. The worst response you ever get is when people say, ‘Meh, it’s okay. It’s fine.’ You’d almost rather they felt something, either they passionately dislike it or passionately, obsessively fall in love with it.”
Regardless of the initial mixed reviews, nearly everyone could agree that a highlight of “Interstellar” was the scene in which Cooper watches years of messages from his kids as they grow up. Chalamet recorded scenes for the sequence.
“When you were filming the messages from home, there was a particular thing where you were hitting a dark tone,” Nolan remembered. “It felt too much for me. I didn’t particularly like it. I told you about it and you went ahead and did whatever the fuck you wanted and carried on. But I was like, ‘He knows what he wants to do and has an idea.’ It wasn’t about being stubborn. You had planned what you wanted to do. You planned your choices and you didn’t want to abandon that on a casual whim for me. You wanted to test that and challenge that and see if I kept coming back, which I didn’t. I’ll find a logic to that in the edit suite.”
Watch Chalamet and Nolan’s full “Interstellar” reunion conversation in the video below.