Most 'Interstellar' viewers think of the movie's black hole as beautiful. This astrophysicist looked at it and thought, “Whoa. That's true.” (From 2014)
dropped in. And while Chris Nolan was rewriting his brother's script, he wanted to get a handle on the science at the heart of his story. So he started meeting with Thorne.
That's not the only headache inducing bit of physics that the film's special effects team had to grapple with. Nolan's story relied on time dilation: time passing at different rates for different characters. To make this scientifically plausible, Thorne told him, he'd need a massive black hole—in the movie it's called Gargantua—spinning at nearly the speed of light. As a filmmaker, Nolan had no idea how to make something like that look realistic.
Thorne sent his answers to Franklin in the form of heavily researched memos. Pages long, deeply sourced, and covered in equations, they were more like scientific journal articles than anything else. Franklin's team wrote new rendering software based on these equations and spun up a wormhole. The result was extraordinary. It was like a crystal ball reflecting the universe, a spherical hole in spacetime.
Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. “I thought we might cross the petabyte threshold on this one,” von Tunzelmann says.