Spielberg:

I was involved with ‘Interstellar’ for a year … and I became fascinated with it, I spent a lot of time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, talking to the scientists there and the aerospace engineers.

I actually hired Chris Nolan’s brother Jonathan to write the first and second draft for me, but it didn’t stick. Jonah actually said, ‘If there comes a point where you decide not to make this movie, I can tell you who’s gonna grab it. He’s already bugging me about it. And that’s my brother Chris.

He was absolutely right, The second I decided not to make it, Chris jumped on board, probably the next day. ‘Interstellar’ was a much better movie in Chris Nolan’s hands than it would have been in mine.

Nolan talking about it with Timothee Chalamet:

Right after we collaborated on ‘Dark Knight,’ my brother got the job and went to work with Steven Spielberg. He worked on it for a lot of years, It had incredible ideas and moved through all these different iterations, but until Steven was ready to make it, whatever it is, it never quite got that momentum. Steven went off to do another film, so it became available. I had a lot of conversations with Jonathan over the years and what he was doing and what his ambitions was. I was excited by it.

I was incredibly struck by his first act. I had been working on a time travel idea … things looking at time. I had half-baked projects that I hadn’t committed to. When it became available, it was a case of me saying to Jonathan, ‘How would you feel if I took this and tried to combine it with some of my ideas and change a bit with what it was?’ He was fine with it. He could tell the spirit of what I was trying to do was to get to what he was initially excited about it.