Timothée Chalamet recently reunited with his “Interstellar” director Christopher Nolan at the AMC Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles to screen the film in Imax 70mm. In a video shared by the Nolan Archives, the “Marty Supreme” Oscar nominee interviewed Nolan ahead of the screening and declared “Interstellar” his personal favorite among his own films.
“Though my role is not enormous in ‘Interstellar,’ I think I was number 12 on the call sheet, this film came to me at a time in life, in my career, where things were certainly not set yet,” Chalamet told the audience. “And it’s remained my favorite project I’ve ever been in. It’s the film I’ve seen the most of, of all the films ever made in human history.”
Chalamet has previously admitted he “wept for an hour” after watching “Interstellar” for the first time and discovering his role as Tom, the teenage son of Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, had been drastically cut down. He told Nolan ahead of the screening that his expectations for his role were distorted from the beginning.
“This was a script [Nolan’s brother Jonathan] wrote for Steven Spielberg,” Chalamet reminded the audience. “When I got the part, I googled the project. The original story was about a father and his son, so I thought, ‘Oh man, I made it!’ And then obviously they reworked it and young Tom was a smaller part, but that’s okay.”
Nolan interjected, “Never believe what you read online!”
As Chalamet and the audience laughed, Nolan explained how “the genesis” of “Interstellar” started as a pitch from physicist Kip Thorne to Spielberg about “doing a science fiction movie about looking out into the greater universe with real science behind it.”
“Right after we collaborated on ‘Dark Knight,’ my brother got the job and went to work with Steven. I get to call him Steven. He’s Mr. Spielberg to you,” Nolan told Chalamet. “He worked on it for a lot of years. It had incredible ideas and moved through all these different iterations, but until Steven was ready to make it, whatever it is, it never quite got that momentum. Steven went off to do another film, so it became available.”
Nolan continued, “I had a lot of conversations with Jonathan over the years and what he was doing and what his ambition was. I was excited by it. I was incredibly struck by his first act. I had been working on a time travel idea… things looking at time. I had half-baked projects that I hadn’t committed to. When it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, ‘How would you feel if I took this and tried to combine it with some of my ideas and change a bit with what it was?’ He was fine with it. He could tell the spirit of what I was trying t