Film director Christopher Nolan on new film Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey

MIND-BENDING director Christopher Nolan dishes the dirt on his latest time-twisting movie Interstellar, with Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey.

CHRISTOPHER Nolan has revealed a few more tasty morsels about his upcoming blockbuster, Interstellar.

But movie fans are still a long way from getting a full meal out of the The Dark Knight and Inception filmmaker.

Speaking at exhibitors’ convention CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the notoriously cagey Nolan said his space epic, due for release on November 6 in Australia, was in the “first cut” phase of post-production.

Nolan, who began making short films as a child, joked that the “endless” ripping off of Star Wars that characterised the films he made as an eight year old has continued into Interstellar. More seriously, he revealed the film is “about interstellar travel” and built around the “science of wormholes”.

“Really, it’s about using a wormhole to travel to a place you couldn’t get to any other way,” he said, adding that it’s “something that really looks at where we are as people and where we might go”.

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Harking back to his experience of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in a London cinema as a seven year old — “I had no idea what the film meant” — Nolan said he wanted Interstellar to return to a time when the term ‘family film’ “didn’t have any pejorative connotations ... when films took me to places I could never have imagined”.

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The movie’s star is Matthew McConaughey. While Nolan would reveal little of the character his leading man plays, he described it as “very much an everyman, someone audiences can experience the events of the movie with”.

Hot property ... Matthew McConaughey, Lupita Nyong'o and Jared Leto pose with award backstage during the Oscars on March 2.

McConaughey’s career reinvention and recent Oscar win has Nolan thinking he caught the actor at “an ideal moment”.

“I had always admired him as a movie star, but didn’t know how much potential he had,” Nolan said. Until, that is, the director was shown an early preview of McConaughey’s indie film Mud. That gave Nolan “the inside track to how good he could be”.

McConaughey’s Interstellar performance, he added, “is shaping up to be extraordinary”.

Nolan was also full of praise for his regular co-worker Michael Caine. The veteran, who played Alfred the butler in all three of Nolan’s hugely successful Batman films, also has a part in the new movie.

“He’s joked over the years that he’s my lucky charm,” said Nolan. “Once an actor gets that into your head, you have no choice but to hire him. So that was a very clever move on Michael’s behalf.

“His work in Interstellar, it’s really exciting to see him doing something he hasn’t done before.”

Nolan also talked about using real locations and constructing “spaceship interiors” for his actors to move around for the film, rather than using green screen, so he could then “shoot like a documentary — put the people in their real environments and shoot what they do”.

The director concluded his conversation with a little rev up for the cinema chains in attendance, telling them he hopes “to give audiences an incredible, immersive experience” and that the “technical aspects of how (Interstellar) is presented are more important than any film I’ve done before”.

Only a brief, mysterious teaser trailer for Interstellar has so far been released. The CinemaCon audience laughed at Nolan’s frequent use of phrases along the lines of “but that’s all I’m going to say about it”.

CinemaCon continues on Thursday, Las Vegas time, with studio Warner Bros presenting their blockbuster-season slate with help from stars including Melissa McCarthy, Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore and Godzilla.