How Spielberg Started Interstellar
In 2006, Steven Spielberg hired Jonathan Nolan to pen a hard science-fiction screenplay derived from theoretical physicist Kip Thorne’s gravitational singularity concepts. When DreamWorks parted ways with Paramount, Spielberg shifted focus to Lincoln, leaving the screenplay dormant until Christopher Nolan boarded in 2012 and overhauled the emotional core.
The Gender Shift of Murph
Jonathan Nolan initially wrote Cooper’s child as a young boy who was mechanically inventive like his father. Christopher Nolan rewrote Murph as a headstrong daughter, recognizing that the emotional anchor between a father and daughter across relativistic time dilation was the missing engine needed to drive Cooper through the black hole.
The Dropped Chinese Expedition
In the 2007 draft, humanity discovers that the Chinese space program secretly launched decades earlier through the wormhole. Upon landing on the ice planet, Cooper and Brand find the remains of a Chinese base whose crews died from neutron star radiation, leaving automated robotic defense dogs patrolling the glaciers.