Matthew McConaughey Breaks Down His Poignantly Heartbreaking One-Take Scene From INTERSTELLAR
Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey gave one of his most moving performances in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar. The film was about space and time travel, the future of the planet, quantum physics, and at the heart of it, family.
There’s a scene in which McConaughey’s character Cooper has to confront the fact that the spacecraft he and his crew are piloting went off course, causing them to jump ahead in earth’s timeline by ten years.
His character receives a video transmission from his two kids, who went from children to adults in that time, and he has to wrap his head around the fact that he missed it.
McConaughey talked about this important scene in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, where he explained:
“It was the first scene up. I had gotten good rest that weekend, and I had had a pretty humble, good weekend. I was with my family. We got in, and Nolan was going to set up, they were about to play the tape. ‘Let’s rehearse the tape.’
“I went, ‘Uh uh, uh uh.’ I remember, I think I had a note. I’d written, ‘See you first, please.' I handed it to Chris. All of a sudden, things came over, and cameras were there, and we played the tape. And again, this is that first take; that’s what we used.”
That’s pretty amazing that it was one shot, and the first take. I remember seeing that scene in the theatre and just crying my eyes out. It’s so shattering to imagine, and it wasn’t hard for McConaughey to go there either. He went on:
“I didn’t have to go to a place. I did think about, and I did try to understand, what if one day you go to work, and [then] you were gone for 10 years. When Casey Affleck and Chastain come on [playing Cooper’s grown up children], the dread of having to miss that in my own life with my own kids, I just reacted.
“Which is what I’ve learned I like to do… there’s things like that. Because I’ve consistently tried to [be like], ‘Let’s just do the first take.’ Because everything after take one is acting, for real. We can improve stuff in take two, but everything after take one, if you’re fully relaxed and just reacting—everything after take one is acting.
“I didn’t want to know what was coming. I wanted to just… that’s all about relaxing, then. That’s just me relaxing, then what happens, happened.”
It all worked out, and McConaughey’s method proved to be exactly right for these scene. I love the movie Interstellar, and it’s cool to hear some of how it was made behind the scenes.