Titan Books have been producing quality ‘The Making Of…’ coffee-table books for a while and now they’ve utterly upped their game with Mark Cotta Vaz’s Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space. The book looks deep inside Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi exploration with boundless access to filmmakers, set designers, cast and crew to create an amazing insight in the process.
INTERSTELLAR as a movie is both complex and accessible, so it’s important for a title like this to give you as much as the film does. If any aspect of Nolan’s work and delving into his ideas and processes interests you, then you’re already in the right place to quench that creative thirst.
Spanning over 153 A4-size pages, there’s no holding back with information alongside deconstruction of the story, sets and real reasons why the cast and crew wanted to be involved and make it look as perfect as possible. Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space features interviews with Nolan himself, plus they talk to his brother and co-writer Jonathan Nolan, producer Emma Thomas, cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, and theoretical scientist Kip Thorne to show us more about how the film came to life.
I heard early on that they wanted to push the boundaries of reality and science-fiction closer together and so Thorne was a vital ingredient in binding it all together. His expert knowledge helped craft the possibility of what a Black Hole could do, how time could change and how to make it as ‘real’ as possible to the widest possible audience and if you ask me, they achieved that magnificently.
There’s behind-the-scenes insight with the likes of lead stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine with the latter revealing how calm and collective a set Nolan makes it while creating his latest project. You have to believe that Chris is a filmmaker in the truest sense because it’s always evident he’s out there to create work that stands the test of time but also brings us something fresh and unique. There’s enough at the top level who like to rehash the old winning formula but Chris Nolan and his dedicated team appear to want to hit the heights and do it in ways you’ve never seen before.
From dust bowls to ice planets, through Black Holes and inside 5-dimensional spaces like the Tesseract, much like INTERSTELLAR itself, there’s nothing that this book doesn’t explore and reveal with vivacious aplomb.
[usr=5] Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space is available now from Titan Books and in all good local bookstores.
