Steven Spielberg’s Interstellar Would Have Been A Very Different Movie
Steven Spielberg was initially slated to direct Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar, though his original screenplay indicates a significantly different film. Interstellar premiered in 2014 as Christopher Nolan’s first movie after the Dark Knight trilogy, featuring big stars like Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, and an early role for Timothee Chalamet. The movie was met with critical acclaim, with much kudos to Nolan’s screenplay, visuals, and extensive scientific research.
Interstellar documents an apocalyptic Earth beginning in 2067, focusing extensively on the Cooper family of Joseph “Coop” Cooper (McConaughey), his two children Murph and Tom, and his father-in-law Donald. Cooper was a former pilot for NASA turned farmer when dust storms took over Earth and left billions to starve. Cooper finds NASA again, and at the behest of his daughter, Murph (Chastain), is recruited to pilot spacecraft searching for new viable planets. Over the course of his journey, he and fellow astronaut Amelia Brand (Hathaway) race against time and the unknown in a giant wormhole near Saturn.
Interstellar may have been a way for Spielberg to mature his early sci-fi movies like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a manner more akin to his intensely dramatic films Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List. Spielberg began developing Interstellar in 2006 and hired Nolan’s brother Jonathan to write the screenplay in 2007, but after his company DreamWorks moved from Paramount to Disney, a new director had to be found. Nolan’s brother recommended him to the studio and he ended up signing on to merge his new screenplay with his brother's. Interstellar is as much a compelling family drama as it is an exploration of space, scientific theory, and human possibility, and Spielberg’s original treatment seems to indicate a much different plot and lesser emotional propensity than Nolan’s.
Spielberg’s original screenplay had China beating the United States in the space race to save humanity. The role of the Chinese begins early in Interstellar whereby the drone Cooper and his kids find on the way to the parent-teacher conference is a Chinese drone instead of the film’s Indian one. According to the script, Cooper and Brand arrived on the ice planet to discover Chinese astronauts had already arrived 30 years prior but had all died. They also found an underground bunker that the Chinese intended to keep their people in had the researchers lived to relay the information, leaving only Chinese robots in the facility. Brand and Cooper also found a black box that generated gravity in the bunker but were attacked by the Chinese robots after taking it with them.
Spielberg’s Interstellar also had the Chinese realize all of the answers that Nolan’s astronauts were searching for with the black hole, but they unfortunately died on their return to Earth. After Brand and Cooper discover the Chinese facility on the ice planet, they must immediately leave and are suddenly sucked into a small black hole where a wormhole opens up, sending them to a hyper-dimension in which the Chinese built a gigantic space station over 4,000 years.
One of the best aspects of Nolan’s Interstellar is the non-romantic dynamic between Cooper and Brand. Most movies want to include a core romantic relationship between at least one of the main characters, but Nolan made a bold move by having their interactions be completely coworker and eventually friend-based. Brand easily could have been replaced with a male astronaut that Cooper finds a deep friendship with, but Christopher Nolan's direction had the amazing insight to include a female astronaut on the ride who holds as much weight as Cooper.
Spielberg had intended for Cooper and Brand to become intimately involved on the Endurance, focusing on their romantic relationship in the latter portion of the film. After viewing Cooper’s children’s video logs and her father’s log where they believe they are the last humans on the planet, Brand and Cooper become intimate before waking up to another gravitational anomaly. Continuing on this, Cooper leaving the new station for Brand at the end would have included the subtext of him seeking her out not just for science and duty to recover his mission partner, but because he was in love with her. Interstellar including a romantic relationship would have distracted from Cooper’s primary goal of returning to Earth and saving his kids, plus it would have taken away Brand's connection to Edmunds and her profound monologue on how love transcends time and space.
The first version of Interstellar only had Cooper and Brand visit one planet: what would later become Mann’s ice planet. Cooper and Brand arrive to find the Chinese station and all the personnel dead but have yet to understand the cause. They discover that the Chinese astronauts hadn’t detected a neutron star that orbits the black holes, emitting powerful radiation every 24 hours on the planet that ended up killing those exposed. Brand and Cooper later go into an underground hole finding an alien lifeform that thrives off of the star’s radiation. As they leave the planet, they discover a new small black hole will emerge near the ice planet in a decade, destabilizing the planet’s orbit and leaving it in a location where they won’t be able to pass back through Gargantua’s black hole.
Nolan’s Interstellar never sees Cooper returning to Earth, though he intended to return to find his children. Instead, he is found by a station as he floats in space on the other side of the wormhole and wakes up to find Murph solved the gravitational problem to save humanity. Spielberg’s original screenplay would have had Cooper return to Earth in the year 2230 with the plans to solve the gravitation problem, only to find it as a wasteland overrun with ice storms. With only despair and a sense of humanity’s death, Cooper lays down in preparation to die in the next ice storm. Cooper then awakens in the medical sector of a giant space station named “Cooper Station” after Murph, similar to Nolan’s Interstellar.
In Interstellar’s original screenplay, NASA sent probes into space instead of Dr. Mann’s (Matt Damon) project, Lazarus, with a group of brave men and women who were initially sent to explore potential planets. The probes played a much more important sci-fi role of the unknown, whereby a probe was the one to lead Cooper to the NASA headquarters. Cooper was asked to investigate a crashed space probe, finding it in Texas with NASA’s logo and a picture of an ice planet. After returning home, Murph tells Cooper to bring the probe back to where it originated, sending them to a California island. Nolan’s version allowed Cooper and Murph to exhibit their keen scientific minds as they realized a gravitational anomaly was speaking in morse code through the dust, giving them the coordinates to NASA’s secret base.
NASA in Spielberg’s Interstellar was also an entirely different setup, almost more akin to the secluded island Spielberg envisioned with Jurassic Park. The original NASA was on a remote island off of California’s coast, with an underground facility. Since the facility was entirely surrounded by water, Brand and Cooper have to go deep-sea diving to salvage parts for their journey.
After drifting out of the black hole, Cooper wakes up in a station to be brought to his elderly daughter Murph who was his guiding light and more of a best friend than a daughter. He hadn’t truly seen her since she was 10 years old and she had spent much of their last virtual interactions angry at him for leaving, so his finally seeing her now far surpassing him in age and life experience was one of the most heartbreaking bittersweet moments in the last decade of films. Close father-daughter moments tend to be heartwarming in movies, but none more poignant than Interstellar's ending where a relieved daughter tells her father he shouldn’t have to watch his child die.
The Cooper and Murph relationship was core to Interstellar’s drama, focusing on the complexities of fathers and daughters compared to Cooper and his son. Cooper and Murph’s bond substitutes the drama that would typically come from a romantic plotline like the Brand-Cooper relationship Spielberg intended. An excellent alteration Nolan made to the original script was changing Murph from a boy to a girl. By making Murph a girl, it implies they became extremely close after her mother died and she filled in the role of his closest relationship. Cooper’s son Tom and his father-in-law Donald seem to have an amicable friendship but they lack the emotional intensity and curiosity of the other Interstellar characters. Writing Murph as a girl removes that question of why Cooper is much closer to her than Tom.
Cooper and Murph’s bond is the emotional anchor and resolution of the movie, so it’s hard to believe Spielberg had intended Cooper to wake up in the station to someone else. Originally, Spielberg wanted Cooper to wake up in the year 2230 and be brought not to Murph (as she obviously would have passed by then), but to his great-great-great-grandson who gives him the watch he originally gave Murph. The timing of it would make sense, but Cooper coming back to humanity without reconnecting with Murph doesn’t give Interstellar the sentimental resolution that ties up the main characters’ journeys with each other.