Original by Finch, August 5, 2020, 13:49
A little older, a little wiser, but happy to see you. —Interstellar
Upon hearing that Interstellar was being re-released, my immediate reaction was: "I need to see it again." I even tried to come up with a reason for this impulse—"to make up for not watching it in theaters back then"—but when I finally sat down in the theater seat, my mind felt muddled, and I couldn't even recall where I first saw the film.
Six years later, all that remained were fragments of key scenes lodged at the edges of my memory, while the details had been reduced to a vague haze, an impression more than a recollection—especially vivid just before the scenes were about to replay on the screen. The local cinema wasn't very big, and the sound system was powerful enough to turn ordinary seats into a pseudo-4D experience. So much so that my envy for friends who had secured IMAX 4D tickets at the provincial capital dwindled considerably.
The theater was only a ten-minute walk from home, and the route crossed a bridge. I snapped a picture of the sky at that time:
Saying it resembles the Endurance would be too far-fetched, but the sense of déjà vu was real. That speck of light above the "spaceship" was Jupiter.
Linking these mundane scenes of nature with human achievements—was it a form of imaginative indulgence to satisfy emotional needs?
And I did the same thing on my way back home from the theater.
Standing on the bridge, I looked again at the night sky in the same direction, surprised to find Saturn positioned above the moon, with Jupiter to its right. A steady glimmer then moved across the sky from southwest to northeast, at one point aligning to the left of the moon—forming what almost seemed like a negative image of a black hole.
Coincidentally, that night was a Sturgeon full moon, its light so abundant it was almost blinding. Saturn and Jupiter had both passed their opposition point, meaning they'd remain visible to the naked eye until the end of the year.
In the movie, Cooper and his crew leave Earth, slingshotting around Jupiter to head towards the wormhole near Saturn. So as I stood there, with the full moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and a commercial airplane all presented before me, I found it hard to tell if I was a helpless observer of Earth or an observer of the cosmos.
At that moment, No Time for Caution began to play in my mind.
When Christopher Nolan first approached Hans Zimmer to compose the score for Interstellar, he began with just a question: "If I wrote a single page, didn’t tell you what it was for, and gave you one day—could you give me whatever came to mind?" Zimmer agreed. One day, Zimmer received a letter—a brief story about a father leaving his children to do something important. Two lines of dialogue were included:
"I'll come back."
"When?"
The letter also quoted words Zimmer had spoken a year earlier, during a long conversation with Nolan and his wife in a London restaurant: "There was no movie to discuss, no project in sight. We were just talking about our kids... Once you have children, you can no longer see yourself purely through your own eyes—you see yourself through theirs."
After reading this letter, Zimmer took a day to compose. He treated the letter as an intimate exchange between a father and his children, channeling his own emotions as a father into the music.
When he played it for Nolan, the director was ecstatic. It was only then that Nolan revealed what kind of movie it was for—a grand story about space, science, and humanity.
"Wait, I just wrote something deeply personal, you know that, right?" Zimmer asked, somewhat bewildered.
"Yes," Nolan replied, "and now I know where the heart of the film lies."
That initial piece of music became the foundation of the entire score.
The most captivating aspect of the soundtrack is Zimmer's use of the pipe organ—a 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ currently housed in London’s Temple Church.
Zimmer once told the Film Music Society that he chose the organ for its scientific significance: from the 17th century until the era of telephone switchboards, the pipe organ was widely regarded as the most complex human-made device. Its appearance reminded Zimmer of the afterburner of a spaceship, while the sound of air flowing through its pipes evoked the experience of astronauts in their suits, where every breath was precious.
The film doesn't directly address questions of faith, but the organ, with its strong religious connotations, made me feel a fleeting sense of detachment from the secular, an opportunity for a kind of "weightlessness," to question the directions humanity and individuals can reach, and to contemplate whether the collective unconscious holds further possibilities.
Since 2014, I've faced many farewells—death severed connections, leaving only recurring memories of the past. An indescribable fear mixed with hope to maintain the bonds that remain, infusing the years ahead.
This time, as I watched the movie, that fear was diluted, and hope grew ever stronger.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
References:
- Gus Lubin: The Story Of How Hans Zimmer Wrote The 'Interstellar' Theme Will Give You Chills
- Katie Kilkenny: Why Interstellar's Organ Needs to Be So Loud: Hans Zimmer's Score Drowns Out Dialogue and Has Already Broken an IMAX Theater, but There's Thematic Significance in All That Noise.
- Inside 'Interstellar' (2015)