Nolan & Snyder Once Shared Notes on Corn-Planting, and It Was a Peak Cinema Moment
How and why the two famous directors might have gotten interested in something as seemingly far-removed from their profession as planting of corn, you might ask? Well, that requires some explanation.
Christopher Nolan is known for his distinctive cinematography, among other things. And a part of his distinctive style is his dislike for overuse of CGI, which became so common, after computer generation of backgrounds started to became faster and cheaper than actually building sets.
You can see the extent of said dislike in Dunkirk (2017), which involved only a minimal use of computer effects, despite including many spectacular scenes, where adding computer-generated imagery might have upped the scale of action.
An example of this attitude, perhaps less immediately noticeable upon watching the movie in question, but directly related to corn, comes from Interstellar.
You see, according to that movie script, Joseph Cooper, its protagonist, had a farm surrounded by corn fields. And not just any farm, but one with some mountains in the distance.
Most directors would have assigned the task of providing this scenery to their CGI specialists, particularly after learning that corn fields against a backdrop of mountains is not exactly a commonly occurring landscape. Nolan, however, refused to take this easy way out.
Instead, he ordered to purchase a plot of land in Western Canada, outside Calgary, where Interstellar was filmed, and to grow real cornfields there.
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Sure, spending $100K on growing corn in a climate normally too cold for it was not a big gamble, given Interstellar's budget of $165 million, but it still indicates unusual attention to relatively small details. And Nolan was not sure how much time investment that would require.
But, as he remembered in an interview with THR, "Luckily, Zack [Snyder] had grown a bunch of corn, so I said, 'How much can you really grow practically?'"
And sure, Snyder's crew, which had to grow corn for Man of Steel, the film that also had scenes on a farm surrounded by cornfields, had some practical advice ready.
"And they had done a couple hundred acres, so we looked into it; we found that where we wanted to build our farmhouse really close to the mountains [outside] Calgary. In the end, we got a pretty good crop, and we actually made money on this."
Sometimes making a real effort pays off in more ways than one. Imagine, though, these two comparing notes on how to grow some corn!