Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Hello, welcome back to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson. That's Mally Rubin. And joining us today from Sycamore Studios, it's Van Lathan. Hey, Van, how you doing? What's up, guys? How are you guys doing? I'm here at Sycamore. S-I-C-K. What about Slickamore? Slickamore is good. Slickamore? I like that. I like both of them. These are fantastic names. We're hearing our new digs.
Everybody's so excited. All right, here's the deal. Mallory and I are at home. Van's luxuriating on our beautiful couch there in the studio. And we are here to talk to you about Interstellar as part of our ongoing Christopher Nolan series. And we'll get into that right after this. All right, so Mallory, do you want to announce the theme that we've definitely planned long in advance? Sure.
We've been planning this for so long and definitely did not just come up with it. What House of R is doing for the month of March? I would say we had planned all of these podcasts and only just recently realized we had many space podcasts in a row because we are so excited for Project Hail Mary. It's a book we love. It's a movie we're very much looking forward to. And so it's space month.
It's space month here at the house of our move over CR month. You're on notice. It's Space Month in March. And we will be doing, obviously we're doing Interstellar today as part of the ongoing Christopher Nolan rewatch on the, here at the House of R, slow and steady march toward the Odyssey. It's the first one of winter. We've been workshopping some titles for that.
I think it'll ultimately fall on Carlos to name it. When the podcast goes live, is it Chill Nolan Winter?
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Chapter 2: What themes are introduced for the month of March?
You've been workshopping some other ideas. Then we're going to be revisiting The Martian because that is another Andy Weir space adaptation. Drew Goddard screenplay. So we need to revisit that film before Project Hail Mary. Then we're going to do a space movie draft. Can't fucking wait. That's going to be a blast. That is going to be so fun. And then we will be diving deep into Project Hail Mary.
And guess what? We're talking to Andy Weir. We got Andy Weir in the pod. Very exciting. Great stuff. Thrilling. So, yeah, it's Space Month. We're really, really excited. And I'm so excited to have Van here for our trip into Interstellar. We could not save the human race without Van. We needed a team-up for Interstellar. It's an absolute must.
Mallory, how can folks keep track of everything we're doing in space and everything else that's happening on the feed? Here's what I would recommend. Follow the pod. That's really all you need to do. Follow the pod on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can see full video episodes of House of R and the Midnight Boys on the Spotify app and the Ringerverse YouTube channel.
You're going to be able to see around the Oscars. You're going to be able to see the annual team up, the Versys. That's a thrill. We're all excited for that. We're going to be gathering next week to do the Versys. It's always a treat, always fun. And while you're at it, follow the Ring of Verse on the social media platform of your choosing. We're not going to tell you what that should be.
Wherever you want to be, that's where we are. Live your life. Live your life. Find us. Find us on the internet. Engage where you will. Yeah, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, et cetera. And then, you know, email us. The inbox is always open. We had a wonderful time with the seasonal mailbag just a few days ago. Keep the emails coming. Send us your Project Hail Mary emails, your Space Month emails.
What do you think should be selected in the space draft, even though you don't know who will be drafting or what the categories are going to be? Let us know. And send us your Project Hail Mary thoughts, your Daredevil thoughts, anything that's coming later in the season. We always love to hear from you, hobbitsanddragons at gmail.com.
Van, what are your thoughts on space and space movies in general? I was thinking about this because I saw Project Hail Mary last night. And then I dusted off Interstellar this morning because I wanted to have it fresh on my mind. And boy, do I feel small this morning. Feel small and dumb. Yeah. And I'm ready. But you know what I think, though?
This is the real take, watching these two movies back to back. And obviously, we'll all, as a family, talk about Project Hail Mary a lot on the channel later on. Space. And movies set in space give creators, filmmakers, a unique opportunity to litigate humanity.
You can make movies in space that tell you more or demonstrate more about what it's like to be human, what it's like to be alive than you can, than you can, you can do that easier in space than you can with movies set like right in the heart of Los Angeles. Around here, there's so many distractions wherever you live.
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Chapter 3: How does Van Lathan relate to 'Interstellar'?
So you have the capacity in a space story to explore all aspects of what frightens human beings and what human beings are driven by, motivated by, trying to preserve. They also, it's just, this is like the most obvious thing to say, but it is just so scary.
cinematic it is this the capacity for grand spectacle in a space opera and a space film and then it's one of the things that i think we're really excited for the to explore more in the in the space draft and any draft here at the ringer there's always bleed across categories but you have an opportunity to try to like codify and define something and as you both are saying
The subgenres inside of the genre of the space film are kind of boundless. You have space horror, you have space friendships, you have space adventures, you have first contact, right? You have space stories that are ultimately more set on some sort of terrain and planet. Is that something from space reaching us on Earth? Have we or other beings gone elsewhere into the great abyss?
can we establish a sense of connection and home? Or will we always feel like we've lost that if we're not on this very planet? It's just, it's great. So I love what it unlocks for people. And like, there's something about when I was texting Joe this, The other day, when I was a kid, I had a telescope, and I loved the idea of having a telescope. And I was weaned on sci-fi stories.
My dad loves sci-fi, and his introduction to something like Asimov's Nightfall, for example, leaving that as one of the stories on the bookshelf in my room is a big gateway for me in getting into all of this in the first place. So... I like kept this telescope at my room and I just always wanted to look up at the stars and think about it. Never really learned how to use it.
And it's a regret of mine to this day. And maybe this is the year that I pivot back to a telescope. But I can't really see stars in Los Angeles. That's the problem. I know. Too much light pollution. Honestly, it's quite tough. Yeah. What about you, Jo? Why do you gravitate toward space cinema? I think that idea of the size thing that Van was bringing up earlier, like how small we are.
When we leave a planet where we are considered like the apex predator, the most important thing on the rock, and then we go out in the world and we see in the wider world, see how big it is, see that there's intelligent life out there, see that there's intelligent life that is far more advanced or far more intelligent than we are, and all of a sudden we're the apes. you know, we're the whatever.
I think that's really interesting. I think there are so many shots in this movie specifically, and we will be spoiling Interstellar, by the way, in case you haven't seen Interstellar. We will be spoiling Interstellar. So what are you doing? Go see that movie and come back and listen to this. But there are so many shots in this movie where the ship's
The ship is so small in relative to the size of everything around it when you see Gargantua or Saturn or even on the ocean of Miller's planet. Like there are all these moments when the minute nature of humanity is taken in sharp relief. And then also one of my favorite things across many space stories is the silence in space. Yeah. Me too. Right?
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Chapter 4: What insights about humanity does space cinema explore?
Amazing. Yeah, okay. So this is actually good old Coop. So when Coop and Murph... follow the gravity puzzle, and they get into the room. Yep. There is a thought that they are inside of an Illuminati meeting, right? There are people, legitimately, the way that scene is set is there are a bunch of people sitting around a table doing some weird shit. They're asking questions.
They're asking questions as if they have some sort of authority. They're asking questions as if Coop is beneath them at first. It seems that way, but what they really are are curious. They're curious about what's happening, right? And... That's sort of, the veil is ripped off that when we find out who they are. They go, this is NASA. So this is not some military installation.
This is not all the world's billionaires. This is not like this end time sort of religious cult that is there to figure out this is NASA. Our relationship to NASA, the fact that we looked at that time at least as the people that explore space, As these people debate, there was an altruism there. We looked at NASA.
We looked at space exploration as something that broadened our experience as a human culture, something that was awesome for us, something that brought us all different types of investments into technology, something that changed our lives and made us understand how we interact with our universe and our natural world. When they go, this is NASA, you feel safe. You feel like he's safe.
That would not be like that right now. If that was this is Space Force or this is Blue Origin or this is SpaceX, you'd be like, it's a bomb villain at the other end of this conversation. You know what I mean? That's what I'm saying. It's a billionaire. The billionaires and the ne'er-do-wells have taken this thing that was so patriotic and American and unifying and all this other stuff.
Anyway, time dilation means that I have done this podcast in a weird order. We're going to go now to our opening snapshot, which we do. All right, so this film was directed by Christopher Nolan. Have you heard of him? Screenplay by Chris Nolan and my beloved Jonah Nolan. We'll talk about some differences between their versions of this story.
But it's based on an idea from Kip Thorne, renowned scientist, Nobel Prize winner, I believe, Kip Thorne, and Linda Opes, who is a producer who worked on Contact. So this came from like...
scientific minds who had an idea for a very grounded i mean mallory not a scientist but has some questions about the science of this movie but the the idea was let's make a space movie that has very grounded science in it and that's what we want to do here um this came out november 26 2014 budget 165 million so less than a christy gnome ad campaign uh box office i
$773.8 million, which is... That's wild, man. Insane. This is an original concept sci-fi movie. Matthew McConaughey was like real hot shit at the time, but like this is like... Yes. 2014, original concept movie, $773 million. million on $165 million budget. This is the fifth highest grossing film for Christopher Nolan after Inception, two Batman movies, and the phenomenon that was Barbenheimer.
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Chapter 5: What visually stunning moments are highlighted in 'Interstellar'?
In general, I think Endurance spinning like a pinwheel across the screen is just visually arresting and astonishing. But particularly the shot we get of Cooper and Amelia and Case and Tars are in their Ranger on the left of the screen and Endurance is pinwheeling and the debris is flying everywhere and the ice planet is beneath them. That is like... It just looks so fucking cool.
And when you got to see that back in the day at the theater or you get to watch it now in 4K, it's like, fuck, this is why we watch movies. It's just amazing. Wait, quickly, quickly, Mallory, did you have any Stranger Things PTSD when you realized that there are 12 spots on the clock that is the endurance? I'm always thinking of Henry and the ticking clock and why it had to be 12. Always, always.
And then I just love the... It's kind of like a twin to the wormhole shop, but in this case, the black hole gargantua when tiny broken endurance is moving toward gargantua and that amazing shot of... light matter bending. And it almost looks like, like, rivers of lava. Like, as they're... That's just... That looks so cool. It just looks so great.
I mean, like, also, part of this is... I mean, I don't know if this is borrowing from someone else's category, but, like, the brand...
cooper handshake on each side of of that experience the way that she reaches out for him on the way in and then he reaches out for her on the way back fantastic great shit okay uh i can't remember to forget you the scene you think about the most i will say um not not just because i'm saving it for later but genuinely true um I think about that brand love monologue the most. It's really good.
That's the one I think about the most. Maybe it means something more, something we can't understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.
Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it. How hot do you think Wolf Edmonds was to inspire this? Had to be a 10. Galaxy crossing devotion. Who would you cast as Wolf Edmonds? Great question. So he has a beard. He has to be a hot bearded scientist. I have no notes. Sounds great. Who would play in 2014? Who is a great hot bearded scientist?
So I don't think he's as pretty as like a Clooney. Cause you know, you had Clooney and gravity. I don't think he's that pretty. I think he is probably, let me see somebody. Is he a bearded Walton Goggins? Maybe not. No. Um, I love Goggins, but he's never going to deliver a scientist of the top tier caliber to be sent on this mission to save Earth. That's not his vibe ever.
I'm trying to think of who it would be. Oh, what's my man from Train Dreams? Oh, Joel Edgerton. Is that him? I could see that being him. For sure. That's a good pick. Joel can grow a great beard. Did you see Matt Damon complaining about the fact that Chris Nolan made him grow a real beard for The Odyssey?
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Chapter 6: How does time dilation affect emotional experiences in 'Interstellar'?
He's like, can we do a fake beard? And Nolan's like, who do you think you're talking to? Grow the beard. Who do you think you're talking to right now? Grow your fucking beard. You're going to be out in the ocean for weeks on end. No glue is strong enough. No. I guess the salt water? Come on. Mallory, what's the scene you think about the most?
The first time I saw this and every time I revisit it, I am just shaken to my core. We've talked about this a lot already, but the dawning horror when you realize the time that was lost on the water planet. It hits so fucking hard. You have the pre-trip down calculus, so you in some ways are prepared, but it's like you can never be prepared.
You can be prepared intellectually, but not emotionally. And that is one of the core aspects of this film. And I think that's really centered effectively here. You know, you have this discussion like plan A doesn't work if the people on earth are dead by the time we get back, et cetera. So there's, how are we, okay, let's do this instead of this.
And how are we going to save as much time as we can? And then it doesn't matter. Everything happens with the tidal wave. They've got to let the engines dry. The time is lost. And the Cooper brand argument
Chapter 7: What themes of love and sacrifice are explored in 'Interstellar'?
after the wave crashes and they are realizing in real time, confronting in real time what this means and what is happening, what's this going to cost us brand a lot, decades. And that argument they have like when he makes the, you know, you eggheads, you know, we're not prepared for this. And she's like, we got further than anyone in human history. And he says, not far enough.
And now we're stuck here till there won't be anyone left on earth to save. And she says, I'm counting every minute Same as you, Cooper. It's just like a perfect movie moment. It's a perfect scene. It's a very important moment for Amelia, I think, for her character. It's like everybody's carrying shit with them, not just Cooper.
But we feel it so keenly because he's our protagonist and we do know what the math means and what he's left behind and who he's trying to get back to. And... That agonizing conversation they have about she basically has to explain time can stretch and it can squeeze, but you can't go back. It's just crushing down on you, just like the water.
This is the realization and the crystallization of what we face, what the cost could be for the people on Earth, but also... The stress of every decision that they make on the planet, in the ship, what every single move or mistake they make might cost them and cost everybody else is just, like, titanic. So I think about that a lot. Also, it's so well said.
There's also this tension between, like, he's a smart pilot and she is... He's smart for a pilot. She's dumb for an astronaut. He's a mission guy. She is a science person. So there's a tension there in him just being completely, what are my parameters? What is this? What is this? And she's sitting down trying to think of things in their totality.
She has to remind him at the end that there's also a cost for her emotionally. Yeah. Because she's an answers person and he's a mission guy. So he's used to tapping her for data and then moving on with the data. This is a stupid answer that I'm about to give. But the most absurdist scene that I always remember is just him going through like the black hole or whatever.
Just how like I had no idea what was going to happen. I still kind of don't know what happened. The Tesseract Library. The Tesseract Library. I still kind of don't understand it. And every time I watch the movie, I hope to understand it more. And it never happens. I don't know. He comes.
When I'm in the theater, this was the part that I was like, it's kind of like, you know, like it was getting the head tilt. I was like that because I'm like, okay, so he's out of his suit. Is this happening for real? Is this, like, something that's... Is this an allegory visually? Or, like, what's going on here?
And every time I watch the movie, I hope to get it a little bit more, and it's not... I know that they came and got him, but, like, it still doesn't make very much sense to me. He got himself. He got himself. He brought himself, right? So that's the bootstrap paradox aspect of this that I think is kind of satisfying on the mystery box puzzle front. I don't... Will, like, does...
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of the character dynamics in 'Interstellar'?
And we had that primer earlier from Amelia of, like, maybe time would render as a canyon or a mountain. So, like, what shape would it take for Coop to be able to... Space library. Yes, a space library that, I mean, it is a wonderful set of bookshelves in Mershroom back in the homestead. No question about it. Built-ins, yeah. Yeah, that's all great.
But this idea of, like, okay, we've been hearing throughout the entire film, they, they, they put the wormhole here. The bulk beings. These anomalies and these gravitational events and using gravity. So the idea that he is initially in this space and crying out to himself, to his kid. He's the one who delivered the message, stay, that young Murph decoded in Morse code.
Because even then, in the climax of the film, his impulse is to say, don't do this thing. Don't wind up right here where you are. And then he has to recognize in real time, I'm the one... Who sent those coordinates so that we could get to NASA so that I could go, there's no they, I'm they. Yeah. I called myself here. Can I? And this fulfilling circular aspect of that paradox.
And then the other little detail is like, because TARS is basically like, Cooper's like people, you know, the conversation about could we have, you can't build this, we can't build this. In the future, it is built by a more advanced evolved version of civilization. Yeah. that only has a chance to evolve in advance because of the things that Cooper and Murph and Elliot did.
I mean, as you know, I love a bootstrap paradox and I love that it was always going to happen this way because it already did happen this way and all that shit, I love. That part I like. Pushing the books and moving the watch, I'm less clear on. Here's my knock. Here's my knock. TARS has to be so stupid in that sequence. Oh, this was a great note. TARS has to just be like, what do you mean, Coop?
And Coop, who's like a fly boy, is like, well, don't you see? This is how this works. I was just like, I mean, it's great that Bill Irwin's voice is there so that it's not just like Coop muttering the shit to himself like you needed someone there.
But they had, I wish they had like explained that TARS was like slightly damaged and malfunctioning or whatever to like help me understand why he was so stupid in that moment. But, Yeah, that's fine. All right, swear to me. This movie is PG-13, which means it could have exactly one F-bomb, and actually it does.
This hasn't been true for a lot of our other Nolan movies, but this one, as Molly already mentioned, Cooper does say fucking coward when he's fighting Dr. Hugh Mann. Yes. But where else would you drop an F-bomb inside of this movie? Van, do you have an answer for this? In the scene where they tell, the yellow old tells him that his son is nothing more than a farmer.
My kid's going to fucking college. Okay. You don't tell me about my kid. Cause that's where it would have been dropped in my life. You know what I mean? My mom and my dad, my kid's going to fucking college, you know? So that, when I, when I thought about it, that's the scene where he, he has a lot of rage, especially for that lady.
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