Despite competition from box-office-crushing hobbits, X-Men, and Autobots, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar landed as one of 2014’s big theatrical hits. But its ultimate legacy wasn’t clear at the time of that success: Would the tear-jerking story of a father crossing the expanse of space to save Earth and his children back home go down as a modern classic, or just another notch on Nolan’s blockbuster belt?
In 2026, the film looks even more important, even more influential than the director’s (extremely influential) Bat-trilogy; Interstellar’s pristine special effects and wondrous storytelling seem to have quietly issued a challenge to the entire science fiction genre, and shifted a bar previously set by 2001: A Space Odyssey. A movie like this month’s Project Hail Mary ultimately owes something to 2001 — any movie set in space does — but Nolan’s ambition gives his contemporaries a new standard to chase, a mix of modern and classic, where CG and practical meld into the ideal form.
Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001 influenced a wide-ranging list of today’s greats, including Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon Ho, Claire Denis, Alex Garland, Denis Villeneuve, Lana Wachowski, and Martin Scorsese. Unsurprisingly, Nolan is also on that list: He’s spoken openly about how formative the experience of seeing 2001 in childhood was to his career.
“My dad took me to see [a re-release] in London, and I’ve always remembered the size of the screen and the image,” Nolan said during Interstellar’s promotional tour. “I think that’s the reason I wanted to do IMAX films and a big IMAX space movie. There’s just something about that that stuck in my head as suggesting the biggest potential of movies.”
Kubrick was one inspiration for Interstellar, but Nolan had his own goals with the film, which began life as a Spielberg project before morphing into a collaboration between Christopher and his brother and Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan (who also co-wrote The Dark Knight). The name of the game was a relentless emphasis on the real. That manifested in the script, which funneled physicist Kip Thorne’s black-hole academia into Nolan brothers’ signature spectacle, and the special effects. There may never be screen robots quite like TARS and CASE again.
But the filming of Interstellar seems to have been what shook filmmakers to the core. Interstellar cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema says he and Nolan “didn’t want to be unnecessarily lyrical or poetic” with the imagery, and they studied films like The Right Stuff and Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror so their approach would be “matter of fact.”
Many of Interstellar’s spacecraft shots were achieved with large miniatures built by New Deal Studios, filmed in VistaVision against black backgrounds, and later enhanced digitally by visual effects artists. The approach made the ships feel like objects with real weight and texture — a philosophy that extended to the actors’ performances as well. Instead of surrounding performers with green screens for cockpit scenes, Nolan projected space imagery outside of the spacecraft windows, which let van Hoytema adjust lighting in real time so reflections and illumination behaved naturally across the set.
The gamble of relying on photographable elements rather than replacement backgrounds and more malleable plate shots clearly paid off — not just during Interstellar’s box-office run, but as a milestone of cinematic art. As someone who has rewatched the scene in which Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper manually redocks his away ship into the spiraling interplanetary transporter unit maybe… I dunno, 10 times in the last week, thanks to Pluto TV’s decision to air Interstellar every single night of the month, I can say: Yup, Nolan did it. He may have dreamt of moviegoers everywhere basking in the 15,000-watt glow of an IMAX-project Interstellar screening, but on my decent flatscreen, with Hans Zimmer’s pounding score working overtime on my soundbar, it moves me to tears every damn time.
I’m clearly not alone. Twelve years after Interstellar’s original release, filmmakers are still chasing a modicum of what Nolan achieved — and stepping in it a little in the process. During the press tour for the upcoming Andy Weir adaptation Project Hail Mary, co-director Christopher Miller sparked a minor stir when he described the production’s approach to visual effects.
“What’s fun about the movie is that there is no green screen in the movie whatsoever. Not a single green or blue screen was used,” Miller told ComicBook.com. “The whole ship was built as a set from the inside. We had a huge section of the exterior of the ship on the outside that we built. [The alien character Rocky] was really with us at all times. And so, that’s what makes it feel real and makes it feel natural.”
While some fans were thrilled at the prospect of a green-screen-less space movie, visual-effects artists quickly pointed out the obvious: A film like Project Hail Mary inevitably involves thousands of digital effects shots.
Miller soon clarified his remarks on social media, explaining that the film absolutely used VFX — but like Nolan on Interstellar, Miller and his directing partner Phil Lord tried to physically build as much of the set as possible before turning to digital tools. ILM digitally created wide exterior shots of the spacecraft, while Framestore achieved the alien character Rocky through a blend of puppetry and animation.
You can argue Interstellar wasn’t the inflection point for this era of palpable sci-fi; by the time it was released, movies like Moon, Sunshine, and Gravity had already experimented with similar approaches in production design. But Nolan’s film arrived with a different cultural force. Its influence ripples through films like Ridley Scott’s The Martian and Alien: Covenant, as well as Ad Astra, which lean into a similar blend of grounded science and tactile environments. Even the rise of LED volume stages — popularized by The Mandalorian — reflects the same impulse to surround actors with imagery they can actually see instead of asking them to perform in a blank green void.
(A visual effects artist who spoke to Polygon on background affirms my hunch: The technical methodology behind Interstellar comes up often during production on space movies. But as this source notes, that doesn’t mean every filmmaker has the vision — or studio support — to employ LED screens early enough in the process to make the Nolan Method a reality.)
Directors have been just as candid about their admiration — or at least, they’ve let their envy beam out. At a panel during the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Colin Trevorrow — then attached to write and direct Star Wars: Episode IX — described his desire to shoot IMAX footage in actual space for the film. Nolan, seated beside him, admitted the idea had come up during the making of Interstellar as well.
“There’s incredible footage from space now,” Nolan said.
That scale and scientific seriousness, combined with Nolan’s own evangelism, turned Interstellar into something like a rallying cry for filmmakers eager to resist the “fix it in CG later” mentality. (And talk up a big game to sell their movies.) Even those who worked on Nolan’s movie seem profoundly moved by the experience. Timothée Chalamet, who played the younger version of Casey Affleck’s character, recently reflected on the experience while on the awards circuit.
“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 said at a recent screening Q&A. “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.”
Kubrick’s 2001 still looms over science fiction cinema as the genre’s most awe-inspiring vision of the cosmos. But Interstellar’s hybrid approach — part Kubrick, part Nolan, part contemporary VFX artistry — has become the blueprint for a new generation of space movies. The goal is no longer simply to imagine the universe, but to make audiences feel like the camera was really there to capture it. The fact that Chris Miller is out there looking to clear Nolan’s bar is enough of a reason for me to see Project Hail Mary on the biggest screen possible. And maybe in endless TV reruns, if it’s that good.
Interstellar is currently streaming on Paramount Plus and free with ads on Pluto TV.