Christopher Nolan‘s epic superhero trilogy is behind him which means it’s time for him to direct something original and better. Consider that less of a knock on his Dark Knight trilogy than it is praise for his non-superhero films like The Prestige, Memento and Inception. But while legions of fans online would squee at word of him directing Will Beall’s script for the Justice League movie… that announcement doesn’t appear to be forthcoming.

He’s going with time travel and some well-earned nepotism instead.

Per THR, Nolan the Elder is in talks to direct Interstellar from a script by Nolan the Younger, aka Jonathan. It’s a grand sci-fi adventure reportedly focusing on wormholes, time travel and other dimensions, and that should be more than enough to get film fans salivating. The script has actually been sitting around for six years and has had Steven Spielberg attached to direct for much of that time. Production never got rolling for whatever reason, perhaps because Spielberg became temporarily enamored with a higher profile sci-fi script <cough>Robopocalypse<cough>, but it appears to be nearing a green light now.

The story is built around theories developed by a renowned physicist named Kip Thorne who is a proponent of potential time travel by way of wormholes. Put simply (and per Wikipedia),

Thorne identified a universal physical mechanism (the explosive growth of vacuum polarization of quantum fields), that may always prevent spacetime from developing closed timelike curves (i.e., prevent “backward time travel”). With Mike Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever he showed that traversable Lorentzian wormholes can exist in the structure of spacetime only if they are threaded by quantum fields in quantum states that violate the averaged null energy condition (i.e. have negative renormalized energy spread over a sufficiently large region).

This has triggered research to explore the ability of quantum fields to possess such extended negative energy. Recent calculations by Thorne indicate that simple masses passing through traversable wormholes could never engender paradoxes — there are no initial conditions that lead to paradox once time travel is introduced. If his results can be generalised, they would suggest that none of the supposed paradoxes formulated in time travel stories can actually be formulated at a precise physical level: that is, that any situation in a time travel story turns out to permit many consistent solutions.”

Make sense? No? Don’t worry, the Brothers Nolan are always happy to simplify and clarify things with their movies.

If Nolan does move forward with Interstellar we wanted to point out something he’s most likely already well aware of… Morgan Freeman knows wormholes. The man hosted a whole series on them for Discovery’s Science Channel, and since we know Nolan likes working with the same people again and again this pairing seems like a no-brainer.