8 Films To Watch Before You See Interstellar

If you’re any kind of film fan, you’re probably planning to see Interstellar this week. How could you not? Regardless of your feelings on Christopher Nolan, it’s going to be the most talked-about movie of the year and you can’t join the discussion if you haven’t seen it (or you can, but nobody will listen to you). But before you see Interstellar, watch these eight films that either directly influenced Christopher Nolan or just share a lot in common. It’s homework, but the fun kind and there won’t be a test later.

1) Signs

There aren’t a huge number of thematic similarities between M. Night Shyamalan’s tin-foil-hatted thriller and Interstellar but there are some parallels early on, and not just because they’re both set in the middle of great big cornfields. There’s the similarity in a father of two who has lost his wife but continues to feel her presence and is repeatedly bothered by things beyond his understanding. There’s the daughter who notices more than any of the adults. Those parallels stop when Signs’ aliens show up, but that’s the point at which the film becomes rubbish so you can stop watching it then.

2)Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky’s version, not Steven Soderbergh’s. Discussing the echoes between the two films might veer too close to spoiler territory, so let’s leave it at saying that both films deal with how space exploration and infinite possibility can affect the mind.

3)Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Nolan cited this and Jaws, and Spielberg’s '80s output in general, as touchstones for the texture of Interstellar. Nolan’s film might share the sci-fi element of Close Encounters but that’s only a very cosmetic similarity. Really, the influence here is in broader themes. Spielberg loves a family man taking on a task far beyond his imagining and the strains that puts on the rest of his home life. Where Close Encounters’ Roy Neary or Jaws’ Brody become obsessed with a mission to the point of neglecting their own family, Interstellar’s Coop neglects his family in order to save them.

4)Gravity

Because no other movie set in space has so effectively made its viewers feel like they’re up there. Alfonso Cuarón kept his focus small, just watching Sandra Bullock’s rookie astronaut as she battled to get home through an endless void, whereas Nolan puts his view on all of humanity. But the pair use similar shots to illustrate how tiny we are when you chuck us up into space and both will give you the same feeling of helpless panic.

5)Apollo 13

For the interaction between the ship’s crew. Spielberg’s space disaster movie showed the intense relationship that builds between three people stuck together in a tin can in the vast depths of nothingness. It feels like a template for the kind of bickering and joshing we see onboard Interstellar’s ship. It also showed how to convincingly depict people in zero gravity.

6)To Kill A Mockingbird

It’s all about the ripple effect of fathers. Does being a good father mean being there at every second your child needs you or does it mean giving your child the tools to cope in the world without you? Atticus Finch is the cinematic dad against whom all others must be judged and there are definite reflections of him in Interstellar’s lead dad, Coop.

7)The Right Stuff

Another of Nolan’s stated influence’s is the three-and-a-bit-hour 1983 movie about the first attempts to send man into space. There are some visual comparisons in how Nolan shows piloting a spacecraft, but the nods are mostly subtler, about how ordinary people square their part in doing something completely extraordinary and in how life on the ground continues as normal while mind-blowing things happen in the sky above them.

8) 2001: A Space Odyssey

Well, obviously. The granddaddy of mind-expanding space movies is one of Nolan’s stated influences on Interstellar. How could it not be? Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterwork is the template for any film exploring what man is, where he fits in the universe, and what’s down the back of the bits of space we haven’t looked at yet. Interstellar even follows a very similar structure and will invite a similar amount of debate over its meaning, particularly from people who’ve been experimenting with… substances.