Christopher Nolan's movies have a very particular aesthetic. Though he works in genres where loads of computer-generated imagery are the norm, he values location shooting, practically staged action, and, of course, the kind of rich, tactile visuals that only film -- not digital -- can give you (at a reel length of 11 miles). There's a reason many cinephiles travel great distances to see his movies projected on 70mm IMAX, and never walk away disappointed.
Nolan's aesthetic preferences were challenged like never before when he took on "Interstellar." The deep space exploration film, based on the brilliant work of astrophysicist Kip Thorne, promised to be a brainy piece of science fiction in the vein of classics like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris" (Tarkovsky's or Soderbergh's). "Interstellar" wound up calling those films to mind here and there, but, really, it was singularly Nolan in its attempt to realistically depict what getting stuck in a tesseract would look and feel like. It's mind-blowing stuff, and to get us to buy into his big leaps, Nolan had to first ground us in a near-future version of Earth that felt lived-in.
To pull this off, Nolan looked to ... Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel?"