One Of Stephen King’s Best Books Helped Inspire A Christopher Nolan Sci-Fi Film

Although most fans of director Christopher Nolan place movies like “Memento,” “Oppenheimer,” or “The Dark Knight” as his best works, those with particularly great taste have always appreciated “Interstellar” as his best achievement. This sci-fi blockbuster is the moment where Nolan, so often criticized for being “cold” with his approach to storytelling, decided to aim right for the heart. There’s nothing more gut-wrenching than Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) watching the 23 years of messages showing his kids growing up in the blink of an eye — except perhaps for watching poor Coop yell at his former self not to leave his daughter behind. Nolan may be known for his puzzle-box style, but “Interstellar” is remarkably simple: it’s a touching, straightforward story about a man trying to get back to his daughter. And also his son, sort of, but mostly his daughter.

It’s that simplicity that makes the whole movie work; because while there is some complicated sci-fi concepts thrown at the audience, and there’s a massive world-ending famine going on in the background on Earth the whole time, Nolan makes it digestible by sticking to Coop and Murph’s perspective. We don’t need to see multiple montages of suffering people to understand what the world is like in adult Murph’s timeline; we just need to see how her relationship with her brother, Tom, is affected by it. From the subplot about Tom being in denial about the dust’s effect on his family’s health, we know everything we need to know about how bad things have gotten. 

That’s why it’s no surprise to hear that Nolan was partially inspired by Stephen King’s “The Stand,” a novel about another catastrophic event that forces humanity to change and adapt. The novel can briefly be seen on Murph’s bookshelf, and when asked about it by Wired, Nolan described the book as, “A bleak scenario that hammers home the fact that our perspective on momentous events will always be intimate.”

“The Stand” and “Interstellar” may not seem that similar; one’s about a pandemic, and the other’s about a man who travels across the universe to find a second home for humanity. But they both share the approach of taking a massive, unfathomable tragedy and making the audience properly feel it. King does this by taking a handful of survivors and depicting the flu-ridden collapse of society through their points of view. The characters start off scattered all over the United States, each witnessing a different version of the same story: everybody’s dying from this horrible super-flu, and nobody knows what do about it. It takes a premise that would, in this society’s future, be told primarily through numbers and statistics, and makes it all feel raw and personal. We don’t need to watch every single victim of the flu die slowly; we just need to see these main characters’ loved ones die, and we can fill in the rest.

“Interstellar” doesn’t branch off into so many different characters’ perspectives — it’s just Coop and Murph’s — but it sticks to the same basic approach of filtering the worldwide tragedy through their personal lens. What’s the world like outside of Coop’s farm, or outside of adult Murph’s job at NASA? We don’t really know for sure; we just know that it can’t possibly be any good, and that’s all we need to be invested in their struggle.

The two stories also share a divisive ending; with “The Stand” being resolved in part through the literal hand of God helping defeat the bad guys, and “Interstellar” being resolved through what’s essentially a time loop machine built by future humans. A lot of readers and viewers found these endings sort of weak, but for others it felt like it was perfectly in line with the approach the story had been taking the whole time. With the full horrors of society’s meltdown often just out of view, the worst of it left to the audience’s imagination, it fits that the source of the solution would be just out of sight too. Coop never meets the mysterious future humans (or whatever they are) who built the giant space library that helps him save the day — but that only adds to the film’s sense of wonder.