Jonathan Nolan opens up about Interstellar’s original darker ending

INTERSTELLAR hits Blu-ray/DVD at the end of the month and before you get a chance to dive into the film's many layers and supplementary material, it's worth reading about what the other Nolan brother, Jonathan, had originally planned for the end of the film. It goes without saying that we're jumping into spoilers at the end of the movie so if you STILL haven't checked this flick out, be sure to do so before reading the rest of this article!

For those who are familiar with the movie, you're aware of the scene where Matthew McConaughey's character is swept into the black hole with TARS and enters the tesseract, of which he's able to manipulate gravity in order to send messages to his daughter in the past regarding the missing key to her formula in order to save everyone on Earth. McConaughey's Cooper theorizes that the tesseract was possibly created by humans of the future who were looking to help. While the rest of the film is pretty scientifically sound as far as the layman goes, this bit jumped into 2001 territory. It's also not what Jonathan Nolan had planned at all.

The Nolan brother was in Pasadena, California for a Blu-ray event of the film, and upon being asked what the end of the film actually meant, he commented, "You’ve got the wrong brother." He then went on to explain that in his more straightforward ending, the wormhole would collapse after attempting to send the data back. This would leave Cooper's sacrifice a true one, as he would find himself stranded in space. Nolan didn't elaborate on what would happen after this, but that undoubtedly meant no back and forth trips for Cooper to see his daughter and get back to Anne Hathaway's character. He also commented that in the original script, the way Cooper and his daughter found the remnants of NASA were initially due to gravity waves emanating from the destruction of a neutron star via black hole, as opposed to Cooper sending a message to himself from within the tesseract.

While Christopher Nolan fans seemed to be pretty happy with the end result of INTERSTELLAR, there's no doubts that it was a polarizing experience for a lot of viewers. Regardless of how you felt about the film, it's definitely worth a trip or two to see how it all plays out. There's some great scenes in INTERSTELLAR and while I think it missed the mark, I'd still recommend everyone see it a few times to digest everything. At the very least, the supplementary features on the Blu-ray look to be fascinating.

INTERSTELLAR hits Blu-ray/DVD on March 31, 2015.

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