You can now see Christopher Nolans Interstellar in theaters, but the movie was

originally developed by Nolans brother Jonathan Nolan for director Steven

Spielberg. As the story goes, Spielberg got the idea for the film after attending a
Caltech workshop. There, physicist Kip S. Thorne, an expert on relativity known
for his prolific contributions to the fields of gravitation physics and astrophysics,
presented his controversial theories about wormholes. Jonathan Nolan was hired
to develop the screenplay for Spielberg, which he originally hoped to direct after
Lincoln. Of course, that didnt happen. Christopher Nolan explained how he got
involved during a press conference I attended in Beverly Hills:
[I] was talking to Jonah [Nolan] about the script he was working on
with Steven Spielberg at the time. Wed bounce ideas off each other and
it sounded incredibly exciting I had the advantage of coming onto the
project late and being able to look at what these guys [Jonah Nolan and
Kip Thorne] had done. A lot of my contribution was ripping things out,
because they put in more of these incredible mind blowing ideas that, I
felt, I could absorb as an audience member. So I spent my time and my
work on the script choosing the more emotive and tactile of these ideas
to grab ahold of. [Jonah] got very busy doing other things so I said,
Hey can I take this and combine it with some other ideas Ive been
working on it was a bit more like him going okay, take a shot, well
see what you do. So I showed him what I had done and he seemed
reasonably happy with it.
The reason Christopher Nolan shares the screenwriting credit on the final film
with Jonathan Nolan is because he reworked the original script with substantial
changes. This left me wondering about the evolution of the project, and how
different Steven Spielbergs version of the film might have looked. Of course,
well never see Spielbergs version but Jonathan Nolans 2008 draft of the
screenplay has been floating around the tracking boards for some time.
Investigating that draft gives us an opportunity to see how the story changed
from when Jonathan Nolan was working on it under Spielberg to Christopher
Nolans final film.

1. Cooper And His Son Murph Find a Fallen Space Probe

The script originally followed 30-year-old Cooper and his two sons. Chris Nolan,
who has a daughter (whom you can see on screen in The Prestige), decided to
change the sex of Murph from male to female. Not much else about the
character is different other than her sex shes still in trouble at school for
showing Coops old textbooks with the uncorrected Apollo mission nonsense.
The sad minor league-looking New York Yankees game is interrupted not by the
dust storm, but instead by a bright blue streak in the sky. A satellite falling to
earth while burning up in the upper atmosphere. After attending Murphs parent
teacher meeting, Cooper is called to help a Galveston farmer who needs him to
come look at her malfunctioning tractors, which were originally programed by
Cooper. In Nolans film it is Coops tractors which are malfunctioning, directed to
the gravity anomaly inside his farm house.
Riggs tractors are attracted to a newly created crater on the edge of her
property. In the crater, Cooper finds an old NASA space probe which has fallen
to earth, the same one which knocked the satellite out of orbit during the game.
Using his modified equipment on the black orb, Cooper is able to hack into the
probe and finds an image of an ice-covered planet surrounded by stars,
alongside a bunch of code he cant puzzle out.

2. A Fallen Space Probe Brings Cooper To NASA, Not a Morse-Code

Gravity Communicating Bookshelf Ghost
Before Cooper can scrap the probe for spare parts (he thinks NASA is completely
disbanded, so there is no point in trying to return it), the probe begins emitting
a loud alarm. They realize that the alarm noise stops briefly when they move the
space probe in certain directions. It is quickly realized that the probe is providing
directions to its home and wont stop sounding its annoying alarm until it gets
there. In the morning, Coop and Murph take the probe in their small airplane
(not the pick-up truck Cooper has in the final film), allowing us to see what
California has become in this desperate future.

The space probe directs Cooper and Murph to a large uninhabited island in Santa
Cruz. On the island they discover a underground industrial facility hidden by
camouflage. They are quickly detected and detained by Amelia Brand and TARS.

3. The Lazarus Missions Never Happened; This Is the First Manned

Mission Through the Wormhole
In the movies storyline, a team known as the Lazarus Mission was sent through
the wormhole a decade earlier to find and transmit data back to Earth about
candidate planets for humans to live on. In the original screenplay, there were
no Lazarus missions. Instead, a series of space probes were sent through the
wormhole to gather data. Imagine a more rudimentary version of EVE from
Pixars WALL-E. The space probe that Cooper discovered was the first one to
return to earth after finding good data.
Cooper helps the scientists unlock the Ice Planet data on the probe, and also
warns them about a huge problem with telemetry board he notices they are
using for the mission. Because of the assets he has shown the robot commander
decides he could be useful to the mission. Cooper, thinking of his two sons, first
turns down the offer and returns home to his farm house before changing his
mind. Murph doesnt lock himself in his room, but instead tries to convince his
dad to bring him with him before saying his goodbyes, giving him the watch and
promising he will return.
Its also worth noting that while Professor Brand (played by Michael Caine) is in
charge of the mission in the film, in the original script the Brand father/daughter
duo reports to an Air Force para-rescue officer named CASE. This is a humansized robot designed to inspire confidence, to which Professor Brand had

delegated leadership duties. Also, Cooper does not have a past relationship with
Professor Brand, who is a minor character in the story.

4. Sphere-Shaped Distortions Visit the Crew While Traveling Through

The Tiny Wormhole
The wormhole is not a gigantic sphere or tube like it is visualized 2001-style in
Nolans film. To navigate through the wormhole in the original script, the
Endurance space station contracts and configures itself into much smaller space,
releasing its nuclear engines on a tether. As they travel through the quiet and
nothingness of the wormhole, the crew can see images of themselves through
the outer hull (a trick of the narrow collar of space they are sinking through.
Cooper smiles at himself. The experience is unnerving.).
It is here where Cooper notices a point of distortion in where it appears that a
giant finger is pushing up against the hull, growing in diameter as it pushes
against the hull. The distortion them begins to bend the empty space inside the
ship for all of the crew members to witness a sphere-shaped magnifying
glass, like something out of a 1990s James Cameron movie (Abyss..etc). Doyle
sticks his hand up, and as it gets absorbed into the sphere it appears mangled
but its really just bending the space around his hand. It moves around the
ship and appears to be examining the crew members. And then suddenly the
distortions disappear as they begin to exit the wormhole.
After the exit the wormhole the Endurance finds itself pulled toward the event
horizon of the black hole which was closer to the mouth than they anticipated.
The pull of the black hole is greater than the power of the engines so the crew
finds themselves unable to change their course. TARS locks himself into the
engine compartment and sacrifices himself to detonate the engine to save the
ship from being sucked into the black hole. But if they overshoot the trajectory,
they might be pulled into Gargantua, the much bigger black hole nearby. This is

TARS fate. Once through the wormhole, they discover all of the other probes are
found to be clustered in one spot on the ice planet, but why?
Hit the jump to learn about the shocking LOST style twist not featured in the
finished movie.
5. The Mission Only Travels To One Planet: The Ice Planet
The mission plan is to go through the wormhole to the other galaxy. Once there,
use the ships trajectory to slingshot around a small black hole named
Pantagruel, a journey that will take a few days but will be the equivalent of
about five earth years, to reach the ice planet they learned about from the space
probe. NASA hopes to find a place to restart human life on the planet, which has
very thin nitrogen-based atmosphere, which has a surface of ninety percent
frozen water, ten percent rock and lots of pockets of oxygen below.
You might be shocked to learn that the original story only visits one planet, the
ice planet that was indicated in the probe. We dont see or hear about any of the
other planets featured in the film. The Endurance parks in orbit a few hundred
kilometers above the surface of the ice planet, and the crew must navigate a
landing module through hundreds of tiny moons hurtling around the planet at
high speeds.

6. You Wont Believe What They Find On The Ice Planet: The Chinese?!
In a Lost-style twist, they discover a metal door hidden underneath the ice.
What?! And steps away they find a bright patch of red fabric below the ice the
flag of the Peoples Republic of China. They open the door and find a dusty
Chinese base camp. How did the Chinese find out about the wormhole?
They discover a half a dozen of NASAs probes locked away in an equipment
locker No wonder they never returned to Earth, the Chinese must have
captured them. They quickly figure out that the crew was from a Mars mission

that the Chinese claimed had been destroyed on landing. But the real truth is
the four person 15 robot mission had landed on the ice planet 30 years ago.
Cooper finds graves for the entire human crew outside in the snow and
meanwhile Roth figures out why: not only is this ice planet orbiting the back hole
but also a neutron star. The black hole shields the planets surface from it for 20
hours a day, and if they dont escape the planet in five minutes the radiation will
cook them alive. With no time to return to the ship, they decide to go down a
three-foot wide mine shaft the Chinese crew were digging in the ice before they
died. But the 150 foot deep shaft isnt enough to shield them from the X-rays, so
they try to make use of a drill and a pick left behind in the shaft.
Case cracks a hole in the ice below them and they fall through the ice thousands
of feet down onto the surface. The planet is actually hidden underneath a cloudlike massive layer of ice, hiding the pure oxygen atmosphere below (created by
tiny organisms trapped in the ice that absorb the x-rays and emit light and
oxygen to the atmosphere below).

7. A Gravity Machine Is Discovered

In the film, Professor Brand has spent his whole life supposedly trying to solve a
gravity equation which would allow Earth to launch a space station saving the
lives of many people on the planet. The original script never had scientists on
earth trying to solve such an issue, and the secret NASA base was not built in a
centrifuge space station. But thats not to say that the gravity problem wasnt
solved elsewhere
In the original screenplay, the crew eventually find a huge fortified Chinese base
on the planet surface. The Chinese robots survived and built the colony to house

thousands of people but since the Chinese government collapsed no one ever
showed up.
According to the logs, the robots discovered evidence of another small black hole
moving into this star system (too small to be seen in the initial survey) which
will divert the orbit just enough that the ice planet will eventually be destroyed
in Pantagruels event horizon. A few years in the robots left the planet and went
in search of a solution, returning with some kind of new technology. They
returned five years later and began experiments before leaving permanently.
In the Chinese bunker, they find the laboratory containing a machine, when
turned on, suddenly the gravity of the room changes and up is down, down is up
and sideways is not. (This whole sequence feels like it would be visually similar
to sequences in Inception, so I can see why Christopher Nolan cut this idea out
of the movie.) The machine somehow adjusts gravity, and Roth theorizes they
created it to maybe fire into the black hole to save the planet. Roth theorizes
that once the Chinese robots realized it wasnt enough, abandoned the mission
but that the technology is what could save everyone on earth being able to
control Earths gravity could let them go anywhere. They load the code for the
gravity machine onto one of the space probes and take it with them.
8. Evil Matt Damon Never Shows Up, But Instead We Get Aliens and Bad
Robots
The jungle underneath the ice turns out to be comprised of fractal alien
creatures who completely disassembles itself into a million different sized
creatures during the day. At first glance, they seem to be trying to kill one
another. The crew later discover that the aliens are a colony of creatures
actually trying to combine and spreading themselves as thin as they can to
absorb the maximum amount of light. Before leaving the planet, Brand takes a
sample of some of the fractal life-forms to bring back with her.
The crew decides to leave the planet but camouflaged Chinese robot marines
reveal themselves and wont let them leave with the technology. CASE stays
behind to hold them off to allow the crew to hike up the mountain to the ice
surface. They make it but their lander has been damaged, keeping them
grounded.
A ridiculously convoluted solution is invented to get them out of the situation,
which involves Roth using the escape rocket from the Chinese shelter to land on
one of the moons orbiting the ice planet and activates the gravity device to allow
the lander to take off, but also sacrificing himself in the process. CASE makes it
back to the lander in time, but Brand and Cooper dont because Brand stumbles
and Cooper decides to go back for her rather than make it to the ship himself.
They embrace as they get pulled up into the thin atmosphere. Somehow Doyle is
able to maneuver the lander beneath them and save them before they die.
Once back on the Endurance, CASE detaches the ships last nuclear engine which
causes the ship to get pulled back towards the black hole. CASE reveals. dun

dun dunnnnnn that he is not actually CASE but one of the Chinese robots (they
look very similar since they are of the same robot marine model). They take him
down but watch helpless as decades play out in fast forward around them as
they get closer to the black hole. The ice planet gets smashed apart as it hits the
event horizon, and then the wormhole gets pulled in as well. The fractal lifeforms Brand took with her are now the last of their kind.
And its worth noting that while Dr. Mann (Matt Damons character) doesnt
appear in this earlier version, much of dialogue about humans being programed
to survive through relationships and how the last thing humans will see before
they die are their children which makes them fight for survival, is delivered by
CASE during Endurances mission to the wormhole. Its interesting that
Christopher Nolan rarely did away with good bits of dialogue, instead
repurposing them in other moments and other characters.
9. Everyone On Earth Dies But The Story Doesnt Cut Away To Show
Whats Happening On Our Planet
They get back to the Endurance to realize that because of time distortion caused
by the black hole they have lost 47 earth years, and just like the movie, Cooper
and Brand get to watch all the video messages from their family and friends
from this huge gap of time. Through the videos we see all of Coopers family
grow old and hear stories about how all of humanity is dying. And then nothing
more. They theorize that probably 300 earth years have gone by and now they
are probably the only three humans left in existence. Such a depressing
thought What to do now? Have space sex!

10. Cooper and Brand Fall In Love, Have Sex In Zero Gravity
Christopher Nolan added most of the emotional beats in the final film and a lot of
the character moments between the crew on the mission and those back home
on earth. Actually, the screenplay takes place entirely from Coopers point of

view, and we dont even intercut back to earth after he leaves the planet. We
never see any of the story of Murph working for NASA and Professor Brand back
home, or the farming journey of Coops other son. We do see the video
messages sent to him by his family (the messages are, for the most part,
remarkably the same as the final film). Cooper does send out an emergency
broadcast in the last minutes before getting sucked into the black hole
apologizing to Murph for not making good on his promise to come back.
But what the original screenplay loses in the emotional connection between
father and daughter, it explores much more fully in the relationship that
develops between Cooper and Brand. Their bond grows over the adventure and
by the end you actually care that they be together. After the escape from the ice
planet and all hope seems to be lost, Brand and Cooper actually have sex in zero
gravity a scene where they pull off each others clothes and have sex while
floating/spinning inside the ship cabin.
11. A Second Wormhole Is Discovered and The Distortion Creatures
Return
Coordinates found in the Chinese crews logs point them to a second wormhole
close to the black hole that they were unaware of. They are able to make
adjustments and hit the second wormhole before the black hole destroys them.
But now they find themselves stuck in the wormhole, nothing but whiteness
everywhere for days.
They eventually encounter those orb distortions, possibly creatures that can only
interact using gravity (a concept used in a much different way in Nolans film).
The things propel the crew through the cabin in what is described as a magical
moment. Brand finds a way to communicate with them though patterns using
ball bearings. The beings somehow guide the ship towards an opening
12. The Ship Finds a Space Station Built Outside of Space and Time
The ship then moves towards an opening, leading to the view of the entire
universe compressed into a flattened disc it is implied that they are now
outside of space and time, looking from some kind of fifth dimension. The ship
then glides town a massive space station overlooking it all. They dock and find
TARS who explains that he orbited the black hole a bunch of times before hitting
the second wormhole. From there he drifted to this space station, which is what
the Chinese were protecting.
On the space station, they have used the code from the gravity machine to come
up with a solution to allow all of humanity to escape in massive circular ships.
Not only that but they realize that the Chinese robots were mapping the millions
of wormholes which connect to virtually every planetary system in the universe,
including a thousand hidden in Earths own galaxy. But the robots were only
looking for one specific wormhole and they found it.

13. A Time Traveling Wormhole is Discovered

The Chinese robots found a wormhole that goes back to earth but also to a
different time, just a few years after they had left. But its unclear if the Chinese
made it back, so Cooper decides it is now their mission to replicate their journey
and get back to Earth.
Brand is skeptical because she knows that time travel isnt possible. She
mentions the video messages as evidence that they wont make it back. Most
scientists believe that if time travel were possible it wouldnt involve multiple
timelines as in Back to the Future but one ever changing timelime if you
traveled back in time and changed it, you would already know about it. The fact
that the video messages point towards them never returning to Earth is evidence
to Brand that it will never actually happen.
Brand instead wants to continue exploring to try to find another place where
human life could thrive, but Cooper made a promise to his son Murph that he
would return, so he must try. Brand gives Cooper half of the fractal life-forms to
double their chance, as a species, to survive. They kiss passionately before she
takes off in the Endurance.
Cooper and Doyle go off in one of the Chinese spaceships, bringing along the
code to rebuild the gravity machine which they implanted in one of the space
probes they found locked up on the ice planet. It is then Cooper realizes that the
probe they have with them is the same EXACT probe he found in Galveston
that additional data he initially found on the probe but was unable to reconcile
was the code needed to build the gravity machine. But then Cooper realizes that
while the probe makes it back, the ship and crew didnt for whatever reason. He
tries to reason with Doyle that they only send the probe into the wormhole, but
Doyle is not having it and locks Cooper in the lander and sends him away as he
continues into the time travel wormhole.
Doyle and the ship dont make it through, but the space probe survives This is
the first time the story cuts back to the Earth point of view, following the space
probe as it smashes into the satellite, lands on earth, just as it had before. At
NASA, no one ever uncovers the code hidden on the probe. Muph is now in his
30s, fixing farmers tractors with repurposed parts, just as her dad had done at
his age. He decides to take Coops old plane to the now abandoned NASA facility
to scavenge parts that he desperately needs to keep going. Murph finds the
place gutted, but hears the familiar chirp of the space probe in the corner.
He brings the probe home and decrypts the additional data. Ten years later,
Murph has built a version of the gravity device but it doesnt work. Another ten
years later and Murphs 18-year-old daughter Emily decides to tinker with it and
gets it working, kind of it blows up the barn.

14. Cooper Arrives Back on Earth, But Humanity Is Completely Gone

From the Planet
Cooper finally finds a way back to Earth, now in the year 2320, two hundred
years after he left. The entire planet looks barren, mother nature has begun to
reclaim it as her own and snow covers the farm land. Cooper finds the remnants
of his old home, and lays there completely alone. An ice storm hits and Cooper
stumbles outside trying to get back to the warmth of his ship. The case of the
fractal lifeforms falls to the ground and smashes, the creatures take home in the
snow causing it to glow. He sees his ship and ties to make his way to it, but is
unable to get there he will die in the arctic tundra of this now desolate planet
alone.
15. The Ending on Cooper Space Station Is the Same, But Different
The original script ends very similar to Christopher Nolans final film: Cooper
wakes up in a hospital bed, in a building contained in a huge space station. In
the script, rangers found him, and returned him to Space Station Joseph A.
Cooper. In the hospital he meets an old man: Anthony Cooper Welling, our
heros great-great-grandson, who transferred to the station to meet Coop. The
old man cant speak, but slowly reaches into a drawer next to his bed and hands
Cooper his watch, the watch he gave Murph when he left. Its a very emotional
moment.
Cooper finds himself in a room with a bureaucrat who asks him why he released
the creatures on earth. It is explained that it was against regulations and that
the fractal creatures could not be contained and took over the planet. Earth from
space now looks like a glowing mass of ice. Cooper asks to be enrolled in the
exploration fleet; the administrator explains that is very unlikely. Most of the
positions are for robots, and there are a huge number of trained applicants and
very few human positions. Coop asks for a spaceship to go in search of Brand,
who has been missing for over 200 human years. Cooper is denied and instead
shown a cornfield on the station where he can spend his days. And just like the
movie, Cooper steals a ship from the space station hanger and goes in search of
Brand.

My Final Conclusions and Thoughts

Steven Spielbergs film likely would have been different than this projects
evolve the longer they are in development. Is the Spielberg-developed draft
better than Nolans final film? Thats hard to say. I think both have their pluses
and minuses.
I really didnt like the deus ex machina of a gravity ghost telling Cooper to go to
NASA in Nolans film. Sure, it turned out to be Cooper communicating from
another dimension but it doesnt make much sense, and I also dont understand
why NASA wouldnt have investigated the phenomenon that revealed their top
secret base of operations. I do like how the original draft brings Cooper to NASA
through the discovery of the space probe.
As much as I love Back to the Future, I love the idea of handling time travel in a
scientifically accurate way with the time travel being concealed plot-wise in
encrypted data on the space probe. I also liked the development of the
Brand/Cooper relationship more in the original draft and was sitting on the edge
of my seat when reading the LOST style twist of the Chinese remains found on
the ice planet.
That said, the ending of the original draft has some great ideas but is too
convoluted to work for mainstream audiences. Im not even sure I explained
what happens well enough in this article. The third act certainly needed more
development. I know some critics are slamming the film for being too
melodramatic but I really responded to the emotional moments between Cooper
and Murph. I do think Nolan doing a simple thing as changing Murphs sex to
female changes so much in the reading and relationship.
But the bottom line is that well never see Spielbergs version, and Im fine with
that. Christopher Nolans Interstellar is the movie we have, and despite any
nitpicks I have with the movie, I still think its a film worthy of seeing more than
once on the biggest screen possible, and that is the highest compliment I can
give it.