Producer Lynda Obst, who developed the project for years at Paramount with Steven Spielberg and writer Jonathan Nolan (who showed the script to his brother Chris when Spielberg eventually stepped aside), was introduced to Thorne 30 years ago when Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date. Sagan eventually married her Cinematheque Ball seatmate Ann Druyan (“Cosmos”) and Obst used Thorne as a consultant on “Contact.” This time, Thorne became so involved with “Interstellar” that he became an executive producer.
Thorne is also close friends with another famous genius astrophysicist, “Theory of Everything” subject Stephen Hawking (Enzio Cilenti plays him in the movie), and makes sure to hang with him for a few days at least once a year.
Check out this amazing article in Wired about how Thorne’s equations yielded new discoveries. He’s going to write some papers, one for the astrophysicist community, the other for visual effects artists about the gravitational lensing by rapidly spinning black holes never seen before, he says in the Wired video below.
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