As anyone who followed the run-up to the release of Christopher Nolan‘s "Interstellar" last year knows, the project didn’t start with him. It was actually eyed by Steven Spielberg long before Nolan came on board, and had a script by Jonathan Nolan, with input from science brain Kip Thorne. Once the older Nolan came onboard to direct, he made significant changes his brother’s script (among them, Murph was a boy in the first drafts of the screenplay), and what you saw on the big screen was Christopher’s take on the material. According to Jonathan, his version had a conclusion that was less cerebral and more science based. **Spoilers ahead**
Okay, so we know that in "Interstellar" Matthew McConaughy‘s Cooper flung himself into the black hole, Gargantua, and landed in the fifth dimensional Galactic Bookcase of timelines, which he uses to speak to his daughter with sand. Or something. At that point in the movie, you’re kinda just going with it, but according to Jonathan, his conclusion "had the Einstein-Rosen bridge [colloquially, a wormhole] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back,” he said during an event to promote the film’s upcoming Blu-ray (via Nerdist).
So what does that mean? Well, in short, no happy ending. No reunion with the elderly daughter and no space dates with Anne Hathaway. It’s theoretically a much darker finale, one that sees the hero succeeding in the mission but dying in the process. While Nolan spent much of the press circuit talking about how scientifically accurate his film is, it should be noted that the gravitational weirdness that Coop and Murph discover was supposed to have been caused by "gravity waves" and detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory. However, C-Nolan ditched that too.
“That was very near and dear to me, but Chris thought it was too much science for the public to digest at once,” Thorne said.
Thoughts? Did Nolan’s approach make his movie more relatable by focusing on character or getting loose with science? Let us know below. "Interstellar" hits home video on March 31st.