Nolan’s Interstellar inspired by Dust Bowl

The 44-year-old British director is currently promoting his new sci-fi flick, which centres on a group of explorers who test the limitations of human space travel by using a newly discovered wormhole.

But the film’s cinematography for spacedust sequences was more influenced by the 1930s Dust Bowl, an ecological disaster that devastated 100,000,000 acres of American farmland in the prairie regions of the country, than other science fiction material.

“There is some CG involved as well, but I wanted the shot to be real,” he explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Because that’s where you most sense the artifice, if you’re not getting the proper interaction, if the actor’s not able to be in it.

“So we spent days and days in this dust cloud. It looked like the Ken Burns [documentary] film about the Dust Bowl that he did for PBS, which was really a remarkable piece of work. We really had to scale back from the reality of what those things were actually like in the Dust Bowl because you look at the photographs, and it actually seems too crazy. I was always fascinated with the idea of presenting what seems like a science fiction doomsday scenario on this sort of big scale that’s actually less than [what] really happened in America.”

The Dust Bowl displaced thousands of families across several states in the Great Plains. Huge clouds of thick black dust emanated from these once fertile farms as agriculturalists suffered severe droughts between 1934 and 1940. Due to farmers’ failure to employ dryland farming methods, the top layer of soil turned to dust and was whipped around the country through powerful wind.

Interstellar, which stars Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, reaches US theatres November 7.