The details and personalities behind the film, Interstellar, are discussed in a Wikipedia article.

The Wikipedia article on Interstellar gives the basic film information, details of the plot, production, visual effects, and critical reviews, and just a bit of comment on the science behind the story.

Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine. The film features a crew of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity. Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay, merging a script Jonathan developed in 2007 with Christopher’s ideas. Christopher Nolan produced the film with his wife, Emma Thomas, and Lynda Obst. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, whose work inspired the film, acted as scientific consultant and executive producer.

Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, and Legendary Pictures co-financed the film, while Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions served as production companies. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot the film on anamorphic 35 mm and IMAX 70 mm photography. Filming commenced in late 2013 in Alberta, Canada; Iceland; and Los Angeles. The film features an extensive use of practical and miniature effects, while Double Negative created additional digital effects.

Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014, in Los Angeles. In North America, it was released in film stock to theaters still equipped to project the format, before expanding to venues using digital projectors. It was successful at the box office and received generally positive reviews from critics, who gave particular attention to the film’s scientific accuracy, musical score and visual effects. At the 87th Academy Awards, the film received five nominations — Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects and Best Production Design.

The wormholes and the black hole, Gargantua, were rendered according to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Deep in the Wikipedia article, there is discussion of how visual depiction of the scientific phenomena evolved.

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film, to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. “For the depictions of the wormholes and the black hole,” he said, “we discussed how to go about it, and then I worked out the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein’s general relativity equations.”[52]

In creating the wormhole and a supermassive rotating black hole (which possesses an ergosphere, as opposed to a non-rotating black hole), Thorne collaborated with visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and a team of 30 computer effects artists at Double Negative. Thorne would provide pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the artists, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and resulted in 800 terabytes of data. The resulting visual effect provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and will lead to the creation of two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community.[53]

Christopher Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole would not be visually comprehensible to an audience and would require the effects team to unrealistically alter its appearance. However, Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable, provided that he maintained consistent camera perspectives. “What we found was as long as we didn’t change the point of view too much, the camera position, we could get something very understandable”.[54]

The portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is considered scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy.[55] The accretion disk of the black hole was described by Thorne as “anemic and at low temperature—about the temperature of the sun,” allowing it to emit appreciable light, but not enough gamma- and X-rays to threaten nearby astronauts and planets.[56]

For a full rundown of many more aspects of the movie, as a story and as a film production, see this Wikipedia article.

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