By November 2007, Jonah, Lynda, Steven, and I had agreed on the structure for a radically revised story based on Lynda’s and my original treatment, Jonah’s big ideas, and the many other ideas that arose from our discussions—and Jonah was deep into writing. Then, on November 5, 2007, the Writers Guild of America called a strike. Jonah was forbidden to continue writing, and disappeared.
I panicked. Will all our hard work, all our dreams, be for naught? I asked Lynda. She counseled patience, but was clearly very upset. She vividly tells the story of the strike in scene 6 of her book Sleepless in Hollywood. The scene is titled “The Catastrophe.”
The strike lasted three months. On February 12, when it ended, Jonah returned to writing and to intense discussions with Lynda and me. Over the next sixteen months, he produced a long, detailed outline for the screenplay, and then three successive drafts of the screenplay itself. When each was finished, we met with Steven to discuss it. Steven would ask probing questions for an hour or more before proffering suggestions, requests, or instructions for changes. He was not very hands-on, but he was thoughtful, incisive, creative—and sometimes firm.
In June 2009, Jonah gave Steven draft 3 of the screenplay, and disappeared from the scene. He had long ago committed to write The Dark Knight Rises, and had been delaying for month after month while working on Interstellar. He could delay no more, and we were without a screenwriter. On top of that, Jonah’s father became gravely ill. Jonah spent many months in London by his father’s side, until his father’s death in December. Through this long hiatus, I feared that Steven would lose interest.
But Steven hung in there with us, awaiting Jonah’s return. He and Lynda could have hired somebody else to complete the screenplay, but they so valued Jonah’s talents that they waited.
Finally in February 2010 Jonah was back, and on March 3, Steven, Lynda, Jonah, and I had a very productive meeting to discuss Jonah’s nine-month-old draft 3. I was feeling a bit giddy. At last we were back on track.
Then on June 9, with Jonah deep into draft 4, I got an e-mail from Lynda: “We have a Steven deal problem. I’m into it.” But it was not soluble. Spielberg and Paramount could not reach an agreement for the next phase of Interstellar, and Lynda couldn’t broker a solution. Suddenly we had no director.
Interstellar was going to be very expensive, Steven and Lynda had independently told me. There were very few directors with whom Paramount would entrust a movie of this magnitude. I envisioned Interstellar in limbo, dying a slow death. I was devastated. So was Lynda, at first. But she is a superb problem solver.
Christopher Nolan, the Director and Screenwriter
Only thirteen days after Lynda’s we-have-a-Steven-deal-problem e-mail, I opened my e-mail queue to find a euphoric follow-on message: “Great talk with Emma Thomas…” Emma is Christopher Nolan’s wife/producer and collaborator on all his movies. She and Christopher were interested. Lynda was tremulous with excitement. Jonah called and told her, “This is the best possible outcome.” But the deal, for many reasons, would not be finalized for two and a half years, though we were fairly certain Christopher and Emma were committed.
So we sat. And waited. June 2010, through 2011, to September 2012. Throughout, I fretted. In front of me, Lynda projected an air of confidence. But she later confided having written these words to herself: “Tomorrow we could wake up and Chris Nolan could be gone, after two and a half years of waiting. He could come up with his own idea. Another producer could hand him a script he likes more. He could decide to take a break. Then I would have been wrong to have waited for him all this time. It happens. That is my life, the lives of creative producers. But he’s the perfect director for us. So we wait.”
At last negotiations began, far, far above my pay grade. Christopher Nolan would direct only if Paramount would share the movie with Warner Bros., the studio that had made his last few movies, so a deal—an extremely complex deal—had to be struck between the two studios, normally rivals.
Finally, on December 18, 2012, Lynda e-mailed: “par and warners agreed to terms. Well chop my liver! starting in spring!!!” And from then on, with Interstellar in Christopher Nolan’s hands, so far as I could tell all was clear sailing. At last! Clear, fun, and invigorating.
Christopher knew Jonah’s screenplay well. They are brothers, after all, and had talked as Jonah wrote. They have a phenomenally successful history of collaborating on screenplays: The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises. Jonah writes the initial drafts, and then Christopher takes over and rewrites, thinking carefully about how he will film each scene as he crafts it on paper.
With Interstellar now fully in Christopher’s own hands, he combined Jonah’s script with the script from another project he’d been working on, and he injected a radically fresh perspective and a set of major new ideas—ideas that would take the movie in unexpected new directions.
In mid-January, Chris, as I soon came to call him, asked to meet me one-on-one in his office at Syncopy, his movie production company on the Warner Bros. lot.
As we talked, it became clear that Chris knew a remarkable amount of relevant science and had deep intuition about it. His intuition was occasionally off the mark, but usually right on. And he was tremendously curious. Our conversations often diverged from Interstellar to some irrelevant science issue that fascinated him.
In that first meeting, I laid on Chris my proposed science guidelines: Nothing will violate firmly established laws of physics; speculations will all spring from science. He seemed positively inclined, but told me that if I didn’t like what he did with the science, I didn’t have to defend him in public. That shook me up a bit. But with the movie now in postproduction, I’m impressed how well he followed those guidelines, while making sure they didn’t get in the way of making a great movie.
Chris worked intensely from mid-January to early May rewriting Jonah’s screenplay. From time to time he or his assistant, Andy Thompson, would phone me and ask that I come to his office or his home to talk about science issues, or come to read a new draft of his screenplay and then meet to discuss it. Our discussions were long, typically ninety minutes, sometimes followed by long phone calls a day or two later. He raised issues that made me think. As when working with Jonah, my best thinking was in the dead of night. The next morning I would write up my thoughts in a several-paged memo with diagrams and pictures, and hand carry them to Chris. (Chris worried about our ideas leaking out and spoiling his fans’ mounting anticipation. He’s one of the most secretive filmmakers in Hollywood.)
Chris’s ideas occasionally seemed to violate my guidelines but, amazingly, I almost always found a way to make them work, scientifically. Only once did I fail miserably. In response, after several discussions over a two-week period, Chris backed off and took that bit of the film in another direction.
So in the end I have no qualms about defending what Chris did with the science. On the contrary, I’m enthusiastic! He turned into reality Lynda’s and my dream of a blockbuster movie with foundations of real science, and with real science woven throughout its fabric.
In the hands of Jonah and Chris, Interstellar’s story changed enormously. It resembles Lynda’s and my treatment only in broadest brushstrokes. It is so much better! And as for the science ideas: they are not all mine by any means. Chris brought remarkable science ideas of his own to the film, ideas that my physicist colleagues will assume were mine, ideas that I said to myself, when I saw them, Why didn’t I think of that? And remarkable ideas arose from my discussions with Chris, with Jonah, and with Lynda.