Our Take
Nolan had exactly the creative conviction Filmanthropy is built on: real over digital, five hundred living acres rather than a green screen. The instinct could not have been more right, and it stopped one question short of something extraordinary. Who could this harvest feed? That the question went unanswered is not a knock on Nolan, who is owed his due, and not a charge of greed. It is the whole argument of this Ledger in a single field: when giving is not designed into a production, even a film about feeding a starving world will grow real food beside real hunger and send it to market.
The record
- Location
- 500 acres near Longview, Alberta, ~35 mi south of Calgary
- Designer
- Nathan Crowley
- Film budget
- Approx. $165 million
- Worldwide gross
- ~$773 million (with re-releases)
- Harvest fate
- Sold at a profit that offset production costs
- People fed
- Zero
- Nearby need (2013)
- Calgary Food Bank: $43M of food, 136,000 client visits, demand doubled since 2008
- Also nearby
- ~60% of Alberta First Nations households food insecure (Treaty 7 land)
Christopher Nolan's conviction on Interstellar was that the farmland had to be real. Five hundred acres of corn, planted near Longview, Alberta, on rolling land beneath the Rockies where corn is not usually grown, which was the point: the film needed a crop struggling where it did not belong. Nathan Crowley, who would later grow nine million tulips for Wicked, was the production designer. He knew the tulips were possible partly because Interstellar had already proved that real agriculture at film scale could be done when a team committed to it.
The corn grew, through a cold snap and the catastrophic Alberta floods of June 2013. At a Hollywood Reporter directors' roundtable, Nolan described its fate plainly: a good crop, sold at a profit that helped offset the budget. The film went on to gross around three-quarters of a billion dollars.
Hold that against what the film is about. Interstellar imagines a near future in which blight has killed humanity's crops one by one until corn is nearly the last thing that will still grow, and the survival of the species depends on whether the next generation can be fed. To tell that story, the production grew five hundred acres of food, real food, on real Alberta soil, and harvested it in a year when the Calgary Food Bank an hour up the road was distributing forty-three million dollars of food across a hundred and thirty-six thousand client visits, its demand doubled since 2008 and a flood deepening the need. The land they grew it on is Treaty 7 territory, where roughly sixty percent of First Nations households were food insecure. A film about feeding a starving world grew a field of grain beside hungry people and sent it to market.
The industry already had the means. Groups like Rock and Wrap It Up, EcoSet, and Earth Angel have moved millions of meals and tons of material out of productions and into communities for years. What a film like this one could use is someone in pre-production whose job is to spot the opening, design the give-back in, and put it before the director and producers early enough to act on. With a crop, that window is the planting, not the wrap. When the role exists, a harvest like this feeds someone. When it does not, the default takes over, and a field of food becomes a line item.
"In the end, we got a pretty good crop, and we actually made money on this."
Christopher Nolan, on the Interstellar corn harvest, The Hollywood Reporter