How Did Interstellar Become Every Dude's Favorite Movie?

I just saw the Odyssey. I was able to get some scalped tickets to a 70mm IMAX screening for 300 bucks. But somehow, I've gotten lost on my way home. I've been wandering for hours? Days? Years? Time makes no sense anymore. Now, sitting here, I am once again thinking about Christopher Nolan. Over the past few years, as I procrastinate writing videos by scrolling through Instagram, I've been noticing more and more clips like these. Match with someone on Hinge and they said, what's my favorite movie? I said, Interstellar. And then he lists his favorites. Interstellar. What are your top three favorite movies? Interstellar. I think I cried even more the second time I saw it on IMAX. What do you want to watch? Uh, I'm cool with anything, honestly. Yeah, uh, man, Interstellar is so good. For some reason, Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's 2014 science fiction epic, has become the cliche favorite movie of every 30-year-old white dude. And also, I'm pretty sure plenty of non-white dudes, too. I don't want to discriminate. Ever since The Dark Knight, Nolan has been a film bro favorite. He's a man whose reputation and popularity seem to grow with each new film. Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, both instant cultural phenomenons. But Interstellar wasn't always embraced like this. In fact, initially, it was considered kind of a disappointment. Putting aside Tenet, obviously Nolan's strangest movie, one for sickos like me, but that confounds regular people, Interstellar has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of any Nolan film, with a 73%. Back in 2014, I saw Interstellar in a half-full IMAX theater, a far cry from today when every IMAX showing of the Odyssey is sold out for months. I liked Interstellar, but I didn't love it. I had a lot of problems with the last hour of it. I was kind of baffled by Nolan, this cold filmmaking engineer, making what turned out to be a gooey, open-hearted movie about love transcending space and time. And then, I didn't watch it again for like six years. But when I did revisit it, and each time I've revisited Interstellar since, I've started to think, wait, maybe this is actually a masterpiece. Maybe this is Nolan's best movie. And now, clearly, as time has passed, a lot of people have come around to the same conclusion. Right now, I should really be figuring out how to get off this damn beach and get home. But honestly, I don't think I can leave until I get to the bottom of this. So thank goodness a kind stranger gave me some of these candies outside the theater, because I'm gonna need the energy. So the question is, what happened? Did the movie change, or did we? Was time, usually the ultimate enemy in Nolan's work, actually the savior here? Why has Interstellar become every dude's favorite movie? In 2012, Christopher Nolan fulfilled his obligation to Warner Bros. and concluded his odd little trilogy about a sad rich guy in a bat costume. The final installment, The Dark Knight Rises, didn't reach the same levels of acclaim as its predecessor, but it was still a massive success, grossing over one billion dollars. And most importantly, it gave the world Tom Hardy's Bane voice, which has lingered in popular culture and brought joy to millions for almost 15 years. They expect one of us to wreckage, brother. Do you feel in charge? I was wondering what would break first. Just recently, Hardy even resurrected it for a rap album, where he performs a monologue from Richard III. Now is the winter of our discontent. That's its own video. Nolan had cemented himself as the premier mainstream filmmaker of the era. Someone capable of getting an original blockbuster greenlit and getting a Best Picture nomination for that same original blockbuster. All eyes were on what he would do next. The pressure, but also the opportunity, had never been greater. Six months later, news broke that Nolan's next film would be Interstellar, a project with an interesting genesis. It began years earlier as a treatment conceived by producer Linda Obst and astrophysicist Kip Thorne, the same people who had worked on Contact. Like Contact, Interstellar was a big, weird, but also grounded science fiction movie, and it was originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg, who brought on screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, Chris's brother. When Spielberg left the project, Chris jumped over, reworking his brother's script himself into the final shooting draft. He cast Matthew McConaughey at the peak of the McConaissance and Anne Hathaway on a career upswing coming off of her Oscar win. The trailers promised a profound, epic movie experience. Stanley Kubrick had obviously always been an influence on Nolan, but here, he was running straight at him, making his own space odyssey and inviting the comparison to one of the greatest movies ever made. The advance press speculated feverishly about its Oscar chances, and then people saw the movie. Interstellar is as incoherent and pretentious as a film can be, enterprising mess, the very best and the very worst of Nolan, a strong undercurrent of cheesiness, a lopsided souffle of a film, ideological monstrosity, all maudlin and mushy, a hallmark worthy sentiment, too much corny philosophy, where Nolan turns out to be a softie, the result is just laughable. The critical response wasn't completely negative, but it was less positive than just about any movie Nolan has ever made. Most viewers didn't have much issue with the film's first half. It had the most incredible spectacle Nolan had ever executed, grounded by compelling family drama and a great performance by McConaughey. It had multiple thrilling set pieces. The cornfield chase, the trip through the wormhole, and in particular, the water planet. But once Nolan revealed what was really on his mind, what the film was actually about, That's where he started to lose people. This all begins with the somewhat infamous monologue delivered by Anne Hathaway's character Amelia Brand, in which she argues that love is a force not unlike gravity, one that transcends space and time. In countless reviews, this was singled out as a low point. Audiences rolled their eyes. This was supposed to be a hard sci-fi movie, and here it was telling us that love, the uncontrollable urges of the human heart, can guide us across galaxies and across decades of time and ultimately save humanity. What was this woo-woo bullshit coming from Christopher Nolan, the cold, calculating filmmaker who gave us the coolest, most nihilistic Joker ever? Who gave us movies about haunted men with dead wives doing Houdini-esque sci-fi magic and writing directions on their own body because they have brain damage? Who gave us the borderline nonsensical concept of riding the kick back up through the layers? Actually, saying this all out loud, Has Christopher Nolan always been an incredibly silly filmmaker? Maybe. But Interstellar was the first time that audiences really bumped against it. They wondered, has Nolan gone soft? Daffy? Off his rocker? What was going on here? He had taken over a Spielberg project, and when he tried on the open-hearted sentimentality that has always come naturally to Spielberg, it turned out to be an awkward fit. Interstellar opened at number two at the box office, making 47 million dollars on its opening weekend. Ultimately, it would still be a major commercial success, but most of its total box office would come from overseas. Domestically, it made significantly less than Nolan's previous three movies. And a month after its release, it was out of the box office top 10. To put this in comparison, this summer, The Odyssey had an opening weekend of $123 million and has already more than doubled Interstellar's domestic gross. And then when the Academy Awards came around, unlike Inception, Nolan's previous original sci-fi blockbuster, Interstellar received no nominations for Best Picture, Director, or Screenplay, only Technical Awards. Earlier this year, in a conversation with our country's second greatest Knicks fan, Nolan said, The film was received in a slightly ambiguous way. It was a little bit snippy. Some of the responses were a bit snippy from critics, a little bit from audiences. It made money, it made very good money around the world particularly. In the years that followed, Nolan made Dunkirk, another hit that finally earned him a Best Director nomination, but it wasn't really until 2020 when Interstellar's reputation started to change. On IMDb's top 250 movies voted on by users, Nolan's movies always tend to be extremely highly rated. The Dark Knight is pretty much a permanent fixture at number three, behind only The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather. For years, Interstellar was around number 30, which is still very high. I mean, this is out of every movie ever made, but it's lower than most Nolan movies. It stayed at that point until late 2020, when it gradually began to climb, and then that climb quickened in 2023, around the release of Oppenheimer, until it landed at its current position of number 17, one spot behind The Matrix and one ahead of Goodfellas. But a more telling metric is Letterboxd, a much newer platform whose user base skews younger. On Letterboxd, Interstellar is the number one most watched movie on the entire platform. It is the number one most liked movie on the entire platform. The way Letterboxd works, in case you're not familiar, is that on every user's profile they can choose four favorite films to display. Interstellar appears as people's favorite movie more than any other film. It has become, and I already hate myself for saying this, The Shawshank Redemption of Gen Z. Last year, when the New York Times published their list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, voted on by readers, Interstellar landed at number five, behind only Parasite, Mulholland Drive, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. It is higher than any other Christopher Nolan movie. Somehow, in the span of one decade, Nolan's biggest disappointment became his most celebrated film. So what happened? Well, to answer that question, we have to actually talk about the film itself. Here's the thing. Upon rewatching Interstellar for this episode, I found that it still has flaws. It still has things that frustrate me more than anything in Oppenheimer, or Tenet, or Dunkirk, or Inception, or The Dark Knight, or The Prestige, or let's just say most of Nolan's movies. So for example, everything with the gravity equation just feels fuzzy to me. I always forget that the thing they're in space to find are a bunch of numbers. Late in the movie, TARS the robot goes and finds the elusive formula offscreen somehow. I'm still not sure what he's doing out there. Jessica Chastain feels a little lost in some of her scenes. All she really gets to do is be grumpy about her dad and stare at a chalkboard trying to, again, solve the gravity equation. After the incredible docking sequence, the film rushes into its climactic stretch, where Cooper enters the five-dimensional tesseract thing, but it jumps through several steps so quickly that I'm always going, wait, hold up, why is he blasting off into this black hole? What is he trying to do here? For a movie with arguably too much exposition, It needs a bit more right here. But then, a few minutes later, the ending over-explains the five-dimensional tesseract, refusing to leave even just a little bit up to our imaginations. You've seen that time is represented here as a physical dimension. It can exert a force across spacetime. Okay, maybe this is a dumb complaint, but I think that having two different robots that look basically identical ...is simply redundant. TARS is great. We love TARS. We don't also need CASE there making things confusing. At a couple points in the movie, Nolan does his classic cross-cutting set pieces. But unlike the editing in Inception or The Dark Knight, there's no causality between the scenes of Cooper on man's planet and Murph trying to rescue her nephew back on Earth. It's just jumping back and forth between unrelated scenes, and one of them is a lot more exciting than the other. And also, What is Topher Grace doing in this movie? Does anyone actually know his character's name? Does Nolan know it? Is he dating Jessica Chastain? Are they just co-workers with crushes on each other? Is he the family doctor? Why does this guy seem like he'd be so willing to kill Casey Affleck with a crowbar if he has to? And really, What's up with the name Topher? Like, what's wrong with Chris? It's good enough for Nolan, and yet despite all of that, ultimately, I don't think any of this stuff really matters all that much. Because the things that do work in Interstellar work so well that they simply power through the film's flaws. Okay, this might seem like an odd statement, but Interstellar is by far Nolan's most American movie. Yes, even more so than Oppenheimer, a movie about actual American history. Nolan, despite seeming like a posh, tea-sipping British man, is actually half-American. His brother Jonathan has an American accent. A vast array of tools at your disposal. What we were bringing to the table was reality. Chris spent much of his early life growing up in America. But almost all of his movies feature British, Australian, or Irish actors playing Americans. Or, in the cases of Inception or Tenet, they star American actors but are set entirely overseas. But Interstellar is set in Nebraska. With the imagery evoking the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. And it has an actual American movie star playing an American in America. It even features baseball and cornfields. Interstellar immediately announces itself as part of a great tradition of American films about NASA and brave, charismatic pilots. McConaughey's Cooper feels like a guy who stepped out of the right stuff. Evoking Sam Shepard's portrayal of Chuck Yeager. He's a daredevil pilot, a brilliant technician, but most of all, he's a cowboy. He's got a Texas drawl, a wry smile, he's got wild eyes. This is a guy who you would follow into a black hole. And unlike pretty much every other Nolan protagonist, this is a guy that you would actually want to grab a beer with. The same cannot be said for Dom Cobb, the most humorless man in movie history. And it's that cowboy spirit that allows the film, for all its cornball sentimentality, to be cool in a way that Nolan's films rarely are. Near the end of the film, in the span of 15 seconds, Matthew McConaughey delivers two Two lines that are, to use technical cinema studies language, The sickest ******* things anyone in a movie has ever said. After Matt Damon's Dr. Mann, an absolute loser, steals a craft and accidentally blows up the airlock, destroying part of their space station and sending it into a dangerous spin, Cooper approaches in his own craft. Brand asks him what he's doing, to which he replies with a single word. Done. Then a few seconds later, TARS informs Cooper that this is not possible. Cooper replies, No, it's necessary. This is, to borrow a line from another Nolan film, Cowboy ----. And here the huge Hans Zimmer organs crash onto the soundtrack, and I want to leap to my feet, scream, and run through a brick wall leaving a Patrick-shaped hole in it. What follows is the most exciting scene of something spinning since the end of Beau Travail. No other Nolan movie has a scene quite like this one. Even with The Odyssey being shot entirely in IMAX, Interstellar remains the most incredible spectacle he's ever made. There's a patience to the filmmaking that he rarely shows, framing shots wider and holding on them longer, creating a genuine sense of awe as we fly through a wormhole, see mountains upside down in the sky, or waves that are hundreds of feet tall. For a director that people think of as hating CGI, Interstellar is actually the most VFX-filled film he's ever made, and I would argue that it's also his best-looking movie. There's a flawless blend of practical and digital elements that come together to create several of the most thrilling scenes in his whole filmography. But another big part of that is the music. Hans Zimmer and Nolan worked together on six films, and probably the best-known sound from that collaboration remains this. But in Interstellar, Zimmer drops the blams and goes full Philip Glass. Much of the film is scored with the echoes of church organs, an inspired choice that grants a spiritual significance to Cooper's task. Interstellar is not a religious film. In fact, the scientific way it frames benevolent alien beings makes it particularly non-theistic. But the way religion helps people make sense of the personal by connecting it to the cosmic is the exact same way that Nolan tries to make sense of love and interpersonal connections by stretching them across the realm of astrophysics. This connection ends up reflected in the score, through a musical language we're familiar with. The language of hymns echoing off the walls of a church. The characters of Interstellar are out in the furthest reaches of the universe, debating what makes them human. And Zimmer's score is out there with them, adding a totally rad metaphysical gravity to it all. When the film received its 10-year anniversary IMAX re-release in 2024, as I sat there in the sold-out Lincoln Square IMAX theater, when the score kicked in and the sound of the organs filled that room, it gave the film this almost religious quality, like we had all gathered there to worship at the church of, to invoke the meme, absolute cinema. Okay, now we have to discuss the most hotly debated aspect of Interstellar. Which, I also think, is the key to the whole film. From the time it was released until today, people tend to point at Anne Hathaway's speech about love as a cheesy weak point. And it's fine if you feel that way. But a lot of those criticisms reduce what she says to love is the fifth dimension. Which is one of those things like the real theme was the friends we made along the way that works as a joke. But it seems like most people misremember what she actually says. Her actual words are, Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. And as much as Nolan is sometimes kind of bad with dialogue, I think this is actually pretty poetic. In fact, that whole speech, and the way Cooper refers back to it at the end of the movie, is a big reason why Interstellar works emotionally. This speech comes at a moment when the crew has to choose between two possibilities. There are two planets that both have promising chances of supporting life, but they only have the resources to go to one of them. Brand argues that they should go to the planet found by Dr. Edmonds, who she happens to be in love with. Cooper tries to frame her feelings as a weakness against her decision-making, but... It's not. She's considered all the math and all the data, and now she's trying to follow a gut feeling, while trying to put that gut feeling into terms that she understands as a scientist. Cooper, on the other hand, hasn't yet reached the understanding that love is a driving force that can conquer time and even death. Which he kind of does later on when he's knocking at death's door and Dr. Mann tells him to think of his children's faces. There may not be any causality between this scene and what's happening back on Earth, you know, the crop burning and the kid rescuing, all that stuff, but it reinforces the interconnection of Cooper and Murph's fates through their love for one another, which Nolan expresses by throwing in a quick shot of the moment Cooper handed Murph his watch before leaving. By putting this moment here, this moment of love embodied by a physical object, he makes this a shared memory between the two timelines, and it's kind of the only thing that connects them in this moment. Of course, Brand trying to connect her intangible feelings to scientific theory doesn't work as scientific theory, but when you're watching a movie, you're dealing with emotions and not with a perfect machine, which is something that Nolan seems to be trying to express here by having his characters struggle with it. Cooper reduces love to social utility, but Brand rightfully retorts, We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that? And then she says something vital that my co-writer Satanth believes unlocks the entire movie. She says, I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade. And you might think that the decade part of that line is the most important part, considering this is a movie about time slippage. But actually, the most important word in this line is the word drawn. This is the same word we use to describe the relationship between heavenly bodies. There may not be an actual relationship between love and gravity. Speaking literally, one is chemical responses in the brain and the other is the curvature of space-time, but we treat them both as these mysterious overpowering forces far beyond our understanding, to the point that we use the same words to describe them. We are attracted to people. We fall in love with them. To us, love is so powerful that it may as well be a cosmic force, one outside our control and understanding, and maybe, possibly, fundamental to the laws of the universe. So no, love is not the fifth dimension. Although it is the fifth element. Or wait, is Leeloo the fifth element? I gotta watch that movie again. Anyway, when the benevolent future beings create a five-dimensional construct for Cooper to send his message, they don't sit him down and explain it on a blackboard. They present a kind of living film reel, one that plays his biggest regret over and over again, a moment steeped in how powerfully he loves his children. Well, how much he loves Murph. Cooper's a funny character. Despite this whole message of, like, loving your children to a borderline cosmic degree, the guy clearly has a favorite child, and it is not Timothée Chalamet slash Casey Affleck. Seriously, uh, uh, Tom, I think his name is, uh, I guess presumably just dies off-screen before the epilogue, and then, uh, no one ever mentions him again. Anyway, looking back at the biggest movies of 2014, it's not radically different from what we have now. The box office top 10 was still full of franchise sequels, but back then, it was worse. The biggest movies of 2014 were the fourth Transformers movie, arguably the worst one, I think we just found a Transformer. and the third Hobbit movie. The Hobformers' year, as we all called it back then. This was the peak of audiences only going to see safe, familiar things. It's no wonder that Marvel became as dominant as they did, because in that top ten, outside of Interstellar, the best movies are the two MCU installments. Interstellar was a Nolan movie, which always did well, but in hindsight, it seems insane that this got beaten by Maleficent or The Amazing Spider-Man 2. And then, time, acting like the crafty ****** Nolan constantly portrays it as, began to change things. Upon Interstellar's re-release in 2024, critic Richard Lawson, who had initially given it a negative review, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair revisiting the film, in which he says, I rolled my eyes at stuff all over again. Maybe I wasn't wrong ten years ago after all. But then, well, the coda of the film began, in which Cooper is somehow rescued by the arc of humanity and reunited with his now elderly and dying daughter. I cried for maybe the last 10 minutes of the movie, bowled over by Interstellar's rendering of a bond echoing and enduring across many decades forward and back. Back in 2014, I wasn't as moved by this cosmic reunion. What has changed, of course, is that time has passed. Now, one decade closer to the end of things, I more painfully understand what Nolan was pondering. The hoary The furry adage about time speeding up as one ages is, in fact, horribly true. And Interstellar literalizes that sensation in staggering micro-dimensions. Look, I don't need to tell you that 2026 is a very different time than 2014. Back then, we didn't know how good we had it. It was the Obama era. We were six years away from ever hearing the word coronavirus. I had hair. According to those IMDb ratings, it was 2020 that the consensus around Interstellar started to shift. The year when people were stuck inside, when things got real bad. And apparently, during that time, a lot of people decided to give this movie another shot. And they saw something that they hadn't before. For one thing, this was right after we got our first ever actual image of a black hole. That's not the most important factor, but it was the beginning of the world around us changing in ways that made us ready to accept this movie with open minds and open hearts. Interstellar shows a world that is falling apart, where culture is rejecting science as people in the streets wear KN95 masks and face food shortages and the effects of climate change. It feels a little less like sci-fi these days. And despite all this, it is a movie that is deeply optimistic, that believes humanity can get through this and thrive again. It hits different now. To use a really, really strained analogy, we are 90-year-old Murph in a hospital bed, and Interstellar is Cooper. The movie is the same, but we have changed. We were angry years ago, but now we've come to understand that it has been there for us all along. See, here's the thing about Christopher Nolan. He has been making the same movie over and over again for the last 25 years, and I do not mean that as a criticism. Plenty of great filmmakers return again and again to the same themes. Like, I don't know if you've heard, but Steven Spielberg is kind of obsessed with his parents' divorce. Nolan's movies continually return to three main themes. Guilt, responsibility, and time. Basically, every movie is some variation on those three themes. Usually, it's about a man who is very good at an important job that he feels a responsibility to do. But that job takes him away from his family, and time keeps slipping away, the ticking clock serving as the ultimate antagonist across his filmography. So, for instance, Dom Cobb blames himself for his wife's death. Leonard Shelby blames himself for his wife's death. Borden and Angiers blame themselves for Angiers' wife's death. Bruce Wayne blames himself for his parents' deaths. Will Dormer blames himself for his partner's death. Oppenheimer blames himself for maybe destroying the world. Odysseus blames himself for war crimes and breaking Zeus' law. In Dunkirk, the soldiers went to war out of a sense of responsibility, and now they want to get home. Same with Odysseus. Batman feels a responsibility to save Gotham City. Cobb has to do one last job so he can get home to see his children. Leonard is trying to avenge his wife's death. Oppenheimer is trying to help his country build an atomic bomb before the Nazis can. And then there is time. Memento unfolds backwards. The Prestige and Batman Begins have non-linear structures arranged around flashbacks. In Inception, time moves at different speeds in different dream layers until it completely freezes in limbo. Tenet is about people moving backwards and forwards through time, meeting at different different points in their own relationships. Dunkirk has multiple timelines, with time contracting in some and expanding in others. And The Odyssey is about a man getting stranded for decades as he attempts to get home. Which brings us to Interstellar, which might be the most complete statement of Nolan's thematic obsessions. It's a movie about a man who has to leave his children behind to lead a mission to potentially save humanity, promising one day he will come home. And due to time dilation, a real gravitational phenomenon, Cooper misses his children's entire lives, as decades pass for them in what feels like only days to him. At the time Interstellar was released, most Hollywood blockbusters were adopting the Marvel method of snarking at their own subject matter. But more recently, big sincere spectacle has become the new in thing in the 2020s. Just look at the success of Top Gun Maverick and RRR and the Avatar sequels. But it's more than just about Interstellar taking itself seriously. See, I think Nolan is unfairly called cold and mechanical. In fact, pretty much all his movies have jokes. I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago. But he tends to work best when telling stories of men pursuing their professional goals, emotions be damned. Batman can't let romance get in the way, and personal ties are a poison for the magicians in The Prestige. His heroes aren't stoic in the traditional sense, but clamping down on their emotions is a key part of what made them tick in the early part of Nolan's career. It's those pesky feelings like grief and guilt that take visual form and derail Cobb's mission in Inception. But then you have Interstellar, this big, broad space adventure that gives people, men especially, permission to get emotional. We all make jokes about Nolan's obsession with dead wives, and to be fair, there are a lot of them. Cue the montage. Interstellar has another dead wife, but this time, her death is not what drives the story. It's just a way to make Cooper a single father. Because this is Nolan's first movie that is really about parenting, where there's an actual family unit. Like, sure, Cobb in Inception has kids, but those kids are basically an abstract concept. They never speak and we never see their faces. The entire plot of Interstellar is hinges on Cooper's relationship with his kids. Tom, played first by Timothée Chalamet and later by Casey Affleck, and Murph, played first by Mackenzie Foy, later by Jessica Chastain, and even later by Ellen Burstyn. Instead of another story about a haunted brooding loner, Interstellar is a movie about a dad. In the first act, before Cooper goes to space, there's real warmth and love there that we're not used to seeing in a Nolan movie. And it's that warmth and love being ripped away that give us two of Nolan's very best scenes. The first comes when Cooper leaves home. After a difficult, tearful goodbye with Murph, who is furious at him for abandoning the family, Cooper drives away. When Murph rushes outside to try to catch him, the dust kicked up by his truck blocks his view of her. Nolan movies can sometimes be wall-to-wall talking, but this is a moment where he lets the visuals and music do the storytelling. And then as we watch this close-up of McConaughey fighting back tears as he drives away, the film cuts straight to the rockets of his spaceship igniting. He's gone. It's some incredible operatic ----, and again, Zimmer's score is going absolutely wild here... It's powerful stuff. But it's 40 minutes later that we get the most emotionally shattering scene that Nolan has ever directed. It comes during Cooper's mission when a few hours worth of disaster loses him several decades back on Earth. And when he sits in front of the video screen, he isn't just watching messages from his children, but he's being told all the important events that he's missed. Graduations, girlfriends, births, and deaths. To his kids, he may as well be dead. He's their ghost. And as much as he's accepted the responsibility of saving the world, he's failed at the responsibility of being a parent. It's a sacrifice he knew he was going to have to make, but it doesn't make it any easier for him. And he knows there's nothing he can do about it. This is the only Nolan movie where the main character breaks down and cries. And as much as I was just joking a minute ago about Cooper not caring about his son, it's specifically the father-son messages that push him over the edge. Videos that remind him that he hasn't been there. And look, what guy isn't going to get emotional about not being able to tell their dad about something important? See, by the time he made Interstellar, Nolan had become one of Hollywood's biggest blockbuster filmmakers. The last time he made something you could call small was The Prestige, and that cost $40 million. But from there on out, his budgets became bigger and his shoots became longer. But this also meant being on set for longer, too. A fear of absent fatherhood that he first explored with Inception, and really leaned into with Interstellar. In fact, the way time works on, say, Miller's planet isn't just about raising the stakes. It's also about the way Nolan sees time as a filmmaker and as a parent. Minutes of the mission cost the characters months of time they could have spent with their families, which is also a devastating expression of how time works on a film set, especially on huge movies like this. You spend weeks at a time meticulously planning and executing and responding to things going wrong, all so you can capture just a few minutes of footage. It's a brain-breaking sacrifice and one that Nolan turns into sci-fi drama. If his daughter's cameo is anything to go by, she's the girl Murph sees before going back to rescue her nephews, then the whole movie kind of becomes an apology letter to his family for jetting off on his own mission of making movies. As Bilge Abiri wrote 10 years after Interstellar's release, This proud yet queasy embrace of sentiment, which at the time felt so out of character for Nolan, now feels like part of a continuum that leads straight to the fugue-state despair of Oppenheimer. Before Interstellar, the director had been perceived as a cool, zeitgeisty figure, a showman with an unmatched instinct for what audiences wanted. With Interstellar, however, he revealed himself to be a far more idiosyncratic and interesting artist. A man trying to walk the knife's edge between popular entertainment and his own personal obsessions. So Interstellar revealed a new, more personal side of Nolan as a filmmaker. At the time, we didn't know what to make of it. It's like seeing your dad cry. It's just confusing. But maybe it was something else. Maybe it was that with Interstellar, Nolan switched his usual font. Just about every movie he's ever made has used Gotham Bold, or occasionally another extremely similar sans-serif font, like Franklin Gothic. But with Interstellar, he switched to Linotype DiDot Pro, a serif font. So why? What do the serifs on the letters represent? Could it be that the curvature of the letters represented, in some way, the curvature of space-time itself? Was it that the title was a synecdoche of the movie, a whole entire movie within the movie, abstracting inward, a mosaic of fractals going deeper and deeper forever and ever, unmeasurable like grains of sand on a beach or drops of water in the ocean itself? An ocean of time. Man, fonts are crazy. Hello from the set of our next episode. Now, you might be looking behind me and going, wait, is that? Patrick, are you really? Yes, this is an episode that is not about movies. This is an episode about Oasis. As longtime viewers of the channel know, the band Oasis and the brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, are one of the great obsessions of my life. And now, finally, at the urging of many of my friends, I've decided to do an entire episode explaining why. And this is our longest episode in, like, two years. So if you've ever asked, what's the big deal with the Wonderwall guys, and why is Patrick so obsessed with them? Well, now, Now you get your answer. And this is specifically aimed at people who don't really care about Oasis, who are not hardcore fans. This is where I explain why I think this is one of the great sagas in all of popular culture. It's the greatest music biopic that hasn't been made. This is a hilarious epic saga soundtracked by some of the best songs ever written. And yes, I also did go out and buy Liam's favorite jacket for this, because, you know, you gotta commit. You gotta commit to this stuff. We've been shooting this for the past five days, and we actually just wrapped, like, minutes ago. But now, since you're watching this in the future, it's actually done. The episode is totally finished, and you can go watch it right now on Nebula. As you may have heard, Nebula is the indie streaming platform that I've been involved with since the very beginning. I'm actually the director of scripted development there, so I'm very involved in all the stuff going on. And you can watch all of my videos on Nebula usually a month before they're released on YouTube. And it's not just me. Nebula is home to over 200 of the best creators working today. And if you enjoy this channel, there are some new shows exclusively on Nebula that you'll probably also like. There's Showrunners, a documentary show by Captain Midnight exploring the careers of legendary TV writers like Rod Serling or Vince Gilligan. And also Movie Night from Man Carrying Thing, a really funny show where he and his wife Nadia introduce each other to their favorite movies like No Country for Old Men and Jerry Maguire. Okay, and what else is there? Oh, yeah, you can watch my short film, The Dinner Plan, featuring Griffin Newman and Zach Cherry from Resident Evil, or the great comedy show, Abolish Everything. I'm a guest on it in season two, and also I will be back in the upcoming season three. There is so much great stuff to watch, and very importantly, Nebula is entirely funded by subscribers. So signing up helps us make new projects, and I'm just going to say... We've got some extremely cool stuff in the works. If you sign up with my link, here it is. It's also in the description, and here's a QR code you can scan. Then you can get a year of Nebula at 50% off, which comes out to only $2.50 per month. And a portion of that goes to supporting my channel, which I very much appreciate. So again, the Oasis episode is out now. I think it's a really fun one. Go check it out.