Actress Anne Hathaway arrives for the premiere of her film "Interstellar" in New York November 3, 2014.CARLO ALLEGRI/Reuters
Of all the IMAX-scaled marvels on display in Christopher Nolan's intricately conceived science-fiction epic Interstellar, among the most heart-stopping is a quiet speech about love given in medium close-up by Anne Hathaway's Amelia Brand. One of a team, led by former astronaut Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), seeking a new home for an endangered earthly population, Brand speaks of love as a cosmic force, a hard-wired, empathetic drive to survival that is the key to the continuance of the human race. It's one of the movie's defining scenes, and Anne Hathaway spoke to The Globe on the phone from Los Angeles about how it came to be.
This was your appearance in a Christopher Nolan film after appearing as the Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. How did that first experience influence your interest in working on Interstellar?
My previous experience with Chris was so wonderful that reading the script was a formality for me. I was going to say yes to anything he ever offered me. When I read the script I was blown away. It was overwhelming even on the page. I remember feeling a lot of things. Remarkably, looking back on it, what I don't remember feeling was doubt or worry or fear. How's he going to pull it off? How is this going to work? I just knew that it would. And I knew that if he was calling and already casting that he had figured out how it was all going to work. It was a matter of just physically doing it.
Tell me more about your first experience of reading the script.
I remember the world falling away. When I first read it I wasn't necessarily interested in reading it for the character, I wanted to read it just for reading it. When I finished I was sobbing. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever read. I couldn't wait to see what he was going to do with it visually, and I wanted to be in it. And just to make double sure I wanted to be in it, I went back and reread it immediately and thought 'Oh, there's a great character here. I don't know how to play her at all. I can't answer any questions about her, but I can't tell that's a great character.'
Was that speech about love in the script at that time?
Yes. The film as you saw it was the script that I read. Totally the same.
Take me back to the actual shooting of that scene. How does Nolan direct something like that?
We were filming for a while when we got to that scene. I worked hard on it at home, making sure I knew all the lines, making sure I knew my intentions. We began filming it at the end of the day. So I knew we were going to come back to it the next day. Chris didn't begin with my close-up. I think he wanted to give me a little space to work through some stuff. So I began and, if I do say so myself, I began poorly. I was attacking the scene from this very dramatically inflated place. So we finished the day and Chris came up to me and said, 'It's good. I don't think it's right. I think you should go home and have a think about it just being simpler.'
He was so kind in the way that he said it. I can be pretty sensitive. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I agreed with him it wasn't right and I did go home and had a think about it, talked to my husband and went back in the next day and began from a much more relaxed place. All of a sudden it clicked for me that when you say these very vulnerable things that are also very weighted in a calm way it was going to make the whole film more interesting. And I believe that it does.
I've spoken with a number of actors who hate working on movies of this scale because they feel the director is too distracted by the technology to pay much attention to their performances. I gather that isn't the case with Nolan.
Not at all. Not even close. Not even a little bit. He's so available. I mean he's got a lot going on so I never wanted to be needy or lean on him too much. But I knew that I could come up, pat him on the shoulder and say, 'Hey I have a question about this,' or 'I'm lost with this' or 'I'm confused.' And he would absolutely be there for me and usually be able to untangle whatever knot I was working on for weeks in a matter of seconds. That was my experience on Batman and so I went into this movie with a great sense of trust in him that became very important. Brand's a tricky character. And the journey that got me interested in her, which was one of arrogance to humility, and theory to presence, could have gone very wrong. It felt like a razor's edge to walk, but I was able to do it without fear because I knew he wasn't going to let me fall.