Every Way Steven Spielberg’s Interstellar Was Different from Christopher Nolan

Credits:- Warner Bros. Pictures, Left Image Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 Via Wikimedia Commons

Steven Spielberg worked on Interstellar for a year before dropping out of the project. We have heard versions of this story back in the day, but Spielberg is himself confirming it during his interview with Empire (via GamesRadar+).

Spielberg shared that astrophysicist Kip Thorne brought him the project with producer Lynda Obst. The Disclosure Day director was “fascinated” with the subject, even admitting to spending “a lot of time at the [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] in Pasadena, California, talking to the scientists there and the aerospace engineers.”

It was he who hired Jonathan Nolan to write the first and second drafts of the movie, which were very different from Christopher Nolan‘s film. However, Spielberg shared that Christopher was already bugging Jonathan about the movie. He shared:

The second I decided not to make it, Chris jumped on board, probably the next day. ‘Interstellar’ was a much better movie in Chris Nolan’s hands than it would have been in mine.

So, what did Spielberg’s movie have that was different from Nolan’s? Here are all the biggest script differences.

1 Steven Spielberg’s Script’s Inciting Incident Was a Fallen Space Probe

In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, it was a gravitational anomaly in Murph’s bedroom that brought Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper to NASA. Nolan wanted to introduce a time-loop concept from the very start. So, the famous ‘ghost’ on the bookshelf turned out to be Cooper himself, communicating back through time.

However, the draft Jonathan Nolan wrote for Steven Spielberg didn’t include this gravitational anomaly. Cooper and Murph come across an unmanned space probe, which turns out to carry encrypted data that led him to NASA’s hidden facility.

It was a more conventional sci-fi approach, but Nolan doesn’t do things conventionally. We have to admit that his metaphysical hook was far more appealing to the larger audience.

2 China Was a Dominant Space Power in the Earlier Version

Spielberg’s story had a major role for China in the mission. Nolan’s movie traded the geopolitical stakes for a NASA-centric story for theatrical appeal. In Spielberg’s Interstellar, China dominated the space race, with NASA shown to be falling behind every step of the way.

When Cooper and Brand reach the ice planet in this story, they discover that Chinese astronauts had actually arrived there 30 years earlier. A crew of four people and 15 robots had landed on the planet. Cooper finds the graves of the human crew.

In the Chinese bunker, Cooper’s crew finds a gravity machine, built by the Chinese robots. It was this technology (not the gravity equation) that eventually provided a solution to the Earth’s gravity problem.

3 Spielberg’s Interstellar Had Killer Robots and Alien Lifeforms

Nolan’s film is famously devoid of alien life. The “they” who place the wormhole near Saturn turn out to be future humans, and the only non-human intelligences in the film are the blocky, deadpan robots TARS and CASE.

Spielberg’s version was a far more crowded sandbox. Cooper and Brand’s exploration of the ice planet’s Chinese bunker eventually leads them to find aliens and robots. The aliens were creatures who could assemble and disassemble themselves into different-sized creatures.

They also encounter hostile Chinese robots that attack them after they recover the gravity machine. One of them even poses as CASE and sabotages Endurance, causing it to get pulled back towards the black hole and causing time to move faster. This event causes the time lapse in Spielberg’s script.

4 No Lazarus Mission, Meaning No Dr. Mann Twist

Matt Damon’s surprise appearance as the cowardly Dr. Mann is arguably Nolan’s most shocking addition to the film. In the movie, a 12-person team known as the Lazarus Mission was sent to scout for habitable planets. Cooper’s mission was greenlit only because Mann reported back desirable results.

However, the big twist revealed that Mann was lying to get rescued, and he tries to kill Cooper. Mann is eventually killed in a failed manual docking operation, but he was the villain that the audience didn’t know they needed in the story.

However, in Spielberg’s version, NASA sends out unmanned probes before Endurance, meaning there was no Mann, no falsified data, and no mid-film betrayal on a frozen world.

Interestingly, Nolan took some of the best lines of CASE in the original script and gave them to Damon’s character. The result was Mann’s powerful dialogues, like: “Our survival instinct is our greatest source of inspiration.”

5 Murph and Professor Brand’s Work Back on Earth Never Happens

In Nolan’s film, a huge chunk of the runtime cuts between Cooper’s crew in space and Murph growing up to work alongside Professor Brand at NASA. Murph and Professor Brand try to crack the gravity equation that will save humanity. That parallel story gives the film its dual emotional rhythm.

However, Spielberg’s script didn’t have this Earth-side storyline. There’s no older Murph toiling over blackboards. And there’s no Professor Brand’s deathbed confession that the equation was a lie.

In the earlier version, Cooper and Brand get to watch all the video messages from their family and friends from the time gap (they lost 47 years!). It is more depressing, as we see Cooper’s family grow old and tell him stories they hear about the slow death of humanity.

6 Chinese-Built Hyper-Dimensional Space Station In Place of Tesseract

In Nolan’s movie, Cooper falls into Gargantua and ends up inside a five-dimensional construct, a tesseract, that lets him communicate with Murph through gravity. He uses Morse code to give Murph the data that Tars collected, helping her to complete the gravity equation.

However, Spielberg’s version didn’t have the tesseract sequence. In this radically different story, Cooper and Brand are pulled through a second wormhole that lands them inside a hyper-dimensional space station.

They find out that the Chinese built this space station, and the killer robots were preventing Cooper’s crew from finding it. They discover that the Chinese crew had found a time-traveling wormhole, and Cooper insists on using it to return to Murph. But that doesn’t happen.

7 Cooper Returns to Earth to Find Humanity Gone

In Spielberg’s version, Cooper and Brand part ways at the space station. Cooper implants the code to rebuild the gravity machine on one of the space probes in his Chinese spaceships. He soon realizes that it was the same probe that he and Murph had found on Earth.

Cooper finds a way back to Earth and arrives in the year 2320, hoping to solve the gravity problem. He finds the Earth completely barren. While he lies in the snow-covered farm land, which was once his home, an ice storm hits. Cooper is unable to get back to his ship and believes that he will die there.

The rest of Spielberg’s story plays out like Nolan’s version, where Cooper wakes up on the Cooper Space Station.

8 Cooper and Brand Had a Romantic Subplot

Nolan chose to keep the dynamic between Cooper and Brand strictly platonic. However, they became lovers at one point in Spielberg’s script. After escaping from the ice planet and finding out about the time lapse, all their hopes are lost.

In that vulnerable moment, they make love in zero gravity. They even share a kiss before parting ways on the hyperdimensional space station. Fortunately, Nolan avoided such a romantic angle. One could argue that Nolan’s story instead shifted the focus to the father-daughter relationships, that between Cooper & Murph and Brand & her father.

9 Murph Was Originally a Boy

If one change sums up how different Spielberg’s Interstellar would have been, it’s this one. Murph was a boy in his story. In Nolan’s film, Murph is Cooper’s daughter, played by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn. Their father-daughter bond is the beating heart of the entire story.

Nolan changed Murph’s gender from male to female because of his daughter. It worked largely in the movie’s favor. Foy’s Murph left an impression with the “stay” scene. Chastain’s Murph made us tear up with those video messages. And the deathbed reunion with Ellen Burstyn playing the role was just a chef’s kiss.

What do you think of these changed aspects in Nolan’s film from Spielberg and Jon Nolan’s initial script? Let us know in the comments below!

Interstellar is now available for streaming on Peacock and Paramount+.