- [Sven] This video is
brought to you by Milanote, a visual tool to get
organized and stay creative. Free link in the show notes. (ambient music) When I first saw Interstellar, I can't say that I really
understood the science behind it. - [Cooper] Once Lander 1
is spent TARS will detach, - [TARS] And get sucked
right into that black hole. - Why does TARS have to detach? - [Cooper] Well we have
to shed the weight, to escape the gravity. - [TARS] Newton's third law. - [Sven] What I did
understand was the emotion. - [Brand] Cooper, you can't
ask TARS to do this for us. - [Cooper] He is a robot, so you don't have to
ask him to do anything. - [Christopher Nolan] The complexity of it is something that I don't think
the audience would be able to have the grasp of
while watching the film. But if we knew what the ruleset was and how it would work mathematically, then the audience would
feel a logic behind it. [Sven] Now that I
re-watched the film closely to analyze the editing, I realized that the rules
behind it are solid. - Goodbye TARS. - [TARS] Goodbye Dr. Brand. See you on the other side Coop. - See you there Slick! (sad music playing) - [CASE] Ranger 2, prepare to detach. - What? No! No! Cooper! - [CASE] Three,
- Cooper what are you doing? - [Sven] Cooper, the main
character sacrificed himself so that the other astronaut can find a new planet
for humans to survive. It's a death sentence, as he gets sucked into a black hole, his ship disintegrates. (eerie music) (Cooper screaming) (explosion) (Cooper breathing heavily) A black hole consumes everything. Light, space, time. Its gravitational field is infinite. - Aargh None of the known laws of physics apply inside a black hole. But instead of imploding, Cooper enters a mysterious tesseract. (metals clank)
(Cooper breaths heavily) A three-dimensional shadow of an unfolded four-dimensional hypercube that otherwise is beyond
our understanding. (metals clanking)
- [Cooper] Aargh. (Cooper breaths heavily) - [Soderberg] Sometimes when
you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that
thing that's impossible, which is entering the consciousness
of another human being. (Cooper breathing heavily) - This scene in Interstellar
took me to a place that very few films ever do anymore. (eerie music) It took me back to the
feeling that I had as a child When I saw my first few
films on a big screen. (Cooper breathing rapidly) It's like the film holds
the answer to how we exist and what will happen to
us when we don't anymore. (upbeat music) - No, no, no, no, no, no. (Cooper screaming) (upbeat music) (Cooper fast falling) Looking at every cut, I created a visual board
of anything that I noticed and eventually arrived at Murph's room to be the key to the film's structure. This is the location that connects us to the
tesseract through time and space. - [Sven] There are six
scenes that take place in Murph's room prior
to the third act climax with Cooper inside the tesseract. Notably he witnesses seven moments, as he skips through the tesseract to access multiple points
in his daughter's timeline. And there's a reason. - [TARS] Cooper, come in Cooper. - TARS? - [TARS] Roger that. - You survived. - [TARS] Somewhere. - [Sven] But first, let's
look at the six scenes with his 10-year-old daughter who is convinced that her
room inhabits a ghost. This is 14 minutes into the
film that we get introduced to this really important location. Nice little dolly in- - Nothing special about witch-book. I've been working on it. - [Cooper] Why? - [Murphy] In case the ghost
is trying to communicate. - I'm trying Morse. - Morse? - Yeah. Dots and dashes, used... - [Cooper] Oh I know
what Morse Code is Murph. I just don't think your
bookshelf's trying to talk to you. - [Sven] Isn't it amazing
how Matthew McConaughey just mumbles his lines? Okay so this is number one, so now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to look for the next scene. And then we're going to call this, Murph's room number two. Sand falling to the ground, it's a specific pattern here. - [Murphy] The ghost.
(eerie music) - [Cooper] Grab your pillow, you're sleeping in with Tom. - There's progression of time, this is like the next day. She wakes up, it's gonna be Murph's room number three. - [Cooper] It's not a ghost, (slow music) it's gravity. (water pouring) - Now we again have progression of time. I'll count this as a new scene. - [Cooper] It's not
Morse, Murph it's binary. Thick is one, thin is zero. Coordinates. - [Sven] So far, all four
scenes were about plot, and really it's just two beats. One, there's a ghost, Two, the ghost sends a message. They're going to figure out the coordinates to NASA. The purpose is to get
Cooper on the space mission, and Murph to meet her
future employer, NASA. He wanted to go alone, but she goes along, she hides in the truck. They explain to him the mission, he needs to go into a
wormhole that was created by somebody artificially so that they can go to a different galaxy and find a new earth-like
planet that they can escape to because earth is going down and they need to get off it. (slow music) (car door closes) Now the last two scenes in
her room are about emotion. (knocking) - [Murphy] Go away. - (Sven) Now he has to tell
his daughter that he's leaving, a pivotal scene and we don't really know
what's blocking the door and they don't get to fight
over him leaving just yet. That's delayed to another scene. - [Murphy] If you're leaving just go. - [Sven] This is good narrative. You don't want to resolve things too fast, you want conflict to linger. Almost two hours later
into the film in Act Three. Cooper makes the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the mission, which gets him stuck inside the tesseract, in what appears to be
some form of afterlife. - [Matthew McConaughey]
Christopher and his brother, wrote completely new rules
for fourth-dimension, fifth-dimension space time, and then, you know, following through on those
rules in our final third act, and this world that he's created, that is incredibly abstract. And in the center of it
though, the heartbeat, is a father faced with the
fact that his daughter, thinks that he abandoned her. Love is that fifth dimension. Love is that thing that
travels through time, forward, backwards, up and down. - [Sven] Okay, seeing the room. (Cooper breathing heavily) So this is a scene that we haven't seen. This happened before the movie started. The one scene that we hadn't
seen in the film before is when he first pushes on the books and causes the toy spaceship to fall. We only saw the aftermath of that, when Murph arrives in the
kitchen early in the film. - [Murphy] Dad, can you fix this? - [Cooper] What the heck
did you do to my lander? - It wasn't me, - [Tom] It was your ghost?! - So technically this moment here happened after this moment right here. I'm going to call this Murph 0. (Cooper breathing heavily) - [Sven] With this moment,
Cooper starts figuring out that he can see into her
room and manipulate objects. And then we're inter-cutting
to present time when she puts that back. He doesn't see this, he sees this. This is the past that he's seeing, but that's intercut with,
her now in present time, what I call present time. His point of view, her memory of it, (Cooper speaking indistinctly) back to him. Very interesting. There are three layers
of reality going on here. This should be down here,
this is present time. This should be up here,
this is in the past. Once I realized that we're dealing with three different time
layers plus her memory, I began to break up the edit and move the shots literally
onto different layers, according to their story time. I think now I figured it out. I'm going to continue building
this structure. At the end of it, we're going to be able
to really see the pattern of how this was cut. I haven't yet addressed the concept of space and time in this film. One of the most startling
consequences of relativity is any moving object slows down in time relative to a stationary observer. So while it took Cooper only a few months for his space mission that
ultimately got him stuck in the tesseract, for his daughter this took 23 years. She's now in present time, basically the same age as her father. As you can tell, I finished breaking
down the tesseract scene into the three different video layers according to the time layers. The scene in total, is thirteen and a half minutes long. You can see that the top layers, this is all the stuff that takes place inside the tesseract with Cooper. That's the bulk of the scene. It's intercut with the past, so this is what he's
seeing through the shelf, and then it's also intercut with Murph now being fully grown- up. So now he's traveling
through the tesseract to a different time, (slow music) and you can see sort of
these ripple effects, where he sees a moment and
it ripples through time. So if you look very closely at the door, it's closing here, and then it's closing just a
fraction of a second later. There's a slight delay. We are in the present. - I don't have time for this, come on! - Okay, this is kind of
like the ticking time-bomb, we're inter-cutting to her co-worker, who is outside there and
he's monitoring the fire because she started a
fire to deter her brother who didn't allow her to
go back into the house. This is really just to add more drama, that we're inter-cutting
between the co-worker, the fire is about to be extinguished, the brother is going to come back, Hurry up. That kind of stuff. - Come on! (yelps) (breathes heavily) - So, so far, the first part
of this tesseract scene, as we're inter-cutting, it's about a father leaving his daughter and him trying to influence the past. He's trying to make
her convince the father in the past to stay. (slow music) - [Cooper] Make him stay, Murph. - And this leading to
the emotional climax. - [Cooper] Don't let me leave, Murph. This is what we call the
dark night of the soul, in storytelling. This is where, - [Cooper] Don't let me leave, Murph. - The main character is
facing its darkest moment and is about to give up. (Cooper screaming) - [Cooper] No! No! No! And this is kind of the center of the tesseract scene here, and we're moving into
a completely new phase, here's a story-turn. - [Murphy] You were my ghost. - She is starting to realize
that the ghost was her dad, and I notice this big chunk here, where we don't intercut at all, before we get to the climax
of the tesseract scene in Chris Nolan's genius story turn, I want to thank Milanote
for their support. I used their visual boards
to organize my research, on Interstellar. The flexible drag and drop interface allowed me to arrange my
findings in whatever way made sense to me and change it around as
I made new discoveries. It's the ultimate digital
pin board that enables you to add and modify texts, pictures, links and draw connections. For example, as I was
watching interstellar, I would take time-coded notes on my board and added screenshots of key scenes that could be potential
bits in my analysis. This served as a quick reference as I was going back and
figuring out my script. I used to do my video
research and scripting in a Google doc. No more. This is better because it's visual. You can add boards within
boards, create task lists, and share it with your collaborators. To organize, experiment and
build your next idea or project sign up now for free, by using my link in the video description. Now back to Interstellar
and how Cooper overcomes the dark night of the soul. - [Cooper] TARS? - [TARS] Roger that. - This is kind of the
mid-point of this scene. - [Cooper] You survived. - Somewhere in their fifth dimension, - So far we're kind of just really dealt with the emotion of the scene, now we're going back into the plot, revealing that TARS the robot is actually still living
somewhere inside the black hole. - [TARS] They saved us. - [Cooper] Yeah? Who the hell is 'they'? And just why would they
want to help us huh? - [TARS] I don't know but they constructed this three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality that will allow you to understand it. - [Cooper] Yeah, that ain't working. - This is just dialogue for the audience. - [TARS] You've seen that
time is represented here as a physical dimension. You have worked out that
you can exert a force across space-time. - The good thing about it is as we learn about the tesseract, our main character is learning that there's a purpose to this construct. - [Cooper] Gravity can
cross the dimensions, including time. - [TARS] Apparently. (slow music) - [Cooper] Do you have the quantum data? - TARS was originally
sent into the black hole to record an otherwise
unattainable set of quantum data that is critical for
solving a gravity problem to build a space station so that the human species can survive. And TARS has the data now. - [TARS] Roger. I have it. - It's interesting it's all on his face. - [TARS] I am transmitting
it on all wavelengths but nothing is getting out Cooper. - [Cooper] I can do this. I can do this. - [TARS] But such
complicated data to a child? - [Cooper] Not just any child. - [Murphy] What else? - He's realizing that
he can use the tesseract to communicate back in time. - Murph the fire is out, come on. - It's interesting that
they intercut Murph and then her co-worker right here again. This just adds extra tension, make it feel like she only
has a limited amount of time to figure out what she needs
to do to save humanity. - [TARS] Even if you communicated here, she won't understand its
significance for years. - [Cooper] (sighs) I
get that TARS, alright? But we, we've got to figure
something out, right? The people on earth, they're going to die. Think, think, think. - [TARS] Cooper, they didn't bring us here to change the past. - Staying in the closeup for this. - [Cooper] Say that again. - [TARS] They didn't bring
us here to change the past. - I love this moment. The editor and Christopher Nolan, give the audience a chance to figure this out for themselves. 'They didn't bring us
here to change the past'. The key word here is 'They'. we get this revealed in this big shot that is 41 seconds long, and it's playing all in his face. (reflective music playing) - [Cooper] No they didn't
bring us here at all. (reflective music playing) We brought ourselves. - And then he moves away. Big turning point here there's new hope because now he understands, This is not just what could potentially be the final flashes in his death. This is a physically constructed space for him to actually fulfill a mission. - [Cooper] Give me the
coordinates for NASA, in binary. - [TARS] Roger. Feeding data. - So he's traveling in time again, but this time he's actually traveling back because the coordinates were revealed before she wrote the message to stay. (machine starting) So this is like Murph room number two. - [Murph] It's not a ghost, - She remembers that line. - [Murph] It's gravity. - [Cooper] It's gravity. (Cooper breathing rapidly) - I brought myself here. - We're bringing along
the rest of the audience. - [Cooper] We are here to communicate with a three-dimensional world. We're the bridge! - The longer this moment goes on, the more information is
being fed to the audience. At this point probably 60% are
already fully understanding what's going on, but we want to bring along everybody. - [Cooper] I thought they chose me. So we are now way into the
second part of the scene, and now it's all about plot. - [Cooper] They didn't
choose me, they chose her. - [TARS] For what Cooper? (chuckles, breathes heavily) - To save the world. - Now he's traveling in time again. - [TARS] It's infinitely complex. They have access to
infinite time and space but they're not bound by anything. - Bringing us along, telling
us what we're seeing. - [Cooper] That's why I'm here. I'm gonna find a way. - [TARS] How Cooper? - [Cooper] Love, TARS, love. - My connection with
Murph, it is quantifiable. It's the key! - Okay this is like the
magical premise of the film, is that love is what
enables them to connect through time and space. (slow music)
- [Cooper] The watch. - TARS, translate the data
into Morse and feed it to me. - So now he's executing on the new plan and the watch, what a great tool to use to communicate the quantum data because obviously the
watch represents time and he's communicating through time. - [Co-Worker] Murph I can see his car! - Ticking time bomb.
- He's coming Murph. - [Murphy] Okay. - She's leaving. She's not going to get the message so we have that last moment, oh, this might all fall apart. (slow music playing) - [TARS] Roger.
Morse is dot-dot-dash-dot. - [Cooper] Dot-dot, dash-dot. - There's a little bit
of an artistic license that we now have to take. He sent the message while the clock was still on the book shelf. We just kind of have to now assume the clock just keeps on
repeating the message. (slow music) - [Murphy] He came back! Murph, who struggled with
her father's decision to abandon her, now finally understands
that he always loved her and sacrificed their time together, in order to save her and everyone else. She's writing down the quantum data, she's including it into her formula. So the mission is completed. She's solved the riddle. - [TARS] The bulk beings
are closing the tesseract. - And we're ending the
scene in the tesseract. - [Cooper] They're not beings, they're us! - [TARS] Cooper people
couldn't build this. - [Cooper] No, not yet. But one day. A civilization that's evolved past the four dimensions we know. (Cooper breathes heavily) - [Cooper] What happens now? - And we are out. Hard cut. He's now somewhere in space. Okay, as you can tell, there's like this middle part here, which is really for him to understand that there is a higher purpose, that everything that
he's done has a reason. No you cannot go back in time, but gravity and love can
send messages back in time. If you kind of go along
with this, it makes sense, very beautifully executed. This is unpredictable to me
and as I was watching the film, I really felt like I'm
discovering something magical. (ambient music) - Narrative should always be
plausible, but surprising. (ambient music) When filmmakers write,
shoot and edit their films, It's a continuous process of discovery. - [Nolan] For me, refining the sequence was all about the emotional side. And then as we came to
actually execute it, that's where the mathematical
design of these concepts and how we were going to portray
this rather fantastic geometry, that became the whole focus
of that part of the process. - [Sven] There were
quite a few more editing and filmmaking nuggets that I discovered. Christopher Nolan chose to
not have fancy camera moves around the spaceship, he attached the camera to the ranger. And this is a much more realistic view of what you would be seeing if you see any mission from NASA. And this creates authenticity, this feels more real. Check out the patreon bonus story, where I showed the most
important takeaways from the other scenes of Interstellar, plus an exclusive link
to my research board. I created with Milanote. Link in the video description. Thanks for watching and happy editing. (slow music playing) (slow music playing) (slow music playing) (slow music playing) (music fades out)
