What was remarkable about Interstellar was how realistic it looked. Most of the special effects were done old school with minimal CGI (e.g., back projection). The spacecraft in the movie were actually models built to scale, not CGI. The views just outside the cockpit of Cooper’s craft were mostly actual views of the real sky using an IMAX camera that was bolted to the side of a real airplane.
The whole film was shot analog on 70MM IMAX, not digital. You need to see it in IMAX to really experience it properly.
The only significant CGI was the rendering of the wormhole and the black hole, and those views were computed using real physics that required 10X more computational power than just a straight texel/mesh rendering. In fact the computer models were so accurate that Dr. Kip Thorne of Cal Tech (the technical consultant on the film) recycled the renderings in a couple real physics papers.
I had heard there was little CGI. Thank you for all the details; very informative.
Interstellar is a thinking man’s movie. Nolan tied everything together nicely, unlike Kubrik. I still don’t know what the end of 2001 means.