As news of Jonah Nolan's hiring to draft a screenplay for the potential Steven Spielberg-directed science fiction epic ""Interstellar"" rippled through cyberspace last week, Nolan admitted to a little starry-eyed wonder.

""I have a better understanding of what those NASA astronauts feel like as they're about to get blasted off into outer space [when I was] waiting to go pitch ideas to Lynda Obst and Steven Spielberg,"" Nolan says of his meeting in January. ""I'm not even sure if I remember what I told them, but they must have liked something. It was a pretty intense experience.""

Indeed they did. Now, as soon as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter helps director-brother Chris finalize prep for the ""Batman Begins"" sequel ""The Dark Knight,"" for which Nolan penned the screenplay, his next job will entail adapting the mind-bending treatment written by Obst and physicist Dr. Kip S. Thorne into a narrative screenplay for the potential Paramount Pictures tent pole.

It's a project that has its genesis in the two-decades-long friendship between Obst, an astronomy enthusiast who produced ""The Siege"" and ""The Fisher King,"" and Thorne, the Feynman professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. (When Obst was producing ""Contact,"" adapted by screenwriters James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg from Carl Sagan's novel, Thorne conceptualized a wormhole sequence for the film that also advanced the field of theoretical physics.)

Over the years, Thorne's work on gravitational-wave detectors, which calculate negative space in things like black holes and imploding galaxies, has been at the very front edge of Einsteinian astrophysics. At one point Obst and Thorne were brainstorming about, as Obst puts it, ""the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans,"" and crafted a potential cinematic scenario that hooked Spielberg enough to consider directing.

Enter Nolan, whose clever, brain-twisting creativity elevated ""Memento"" and ""The Prestige,"" both directed by Chris, above their erstwhile genre material. Nolan's original short story, ""Memento Mori,"" was the basis for his brother's screenplay for ""Memento,"" which earned them both Oscar nominations. According to Obst, Nolan took the ""Interstellar"" treatment's ""basic idea"" and ""added a time element that none of us had thought of."" (Obst and Thorne may retain story credit on ""Interstellar."")

""It really is true that truth is stranger than fiction, and we want to explore some of that,"" says Nolan, who as a young boy loved to watch old 8-millimeter NASA film strips of Saturn V launches with older brother Chris. ""A lot of the narrative will be suggested by some of these amazing ideas that Dr. Thorne has been working on ? his accumulated knowledge of the wonders of the universe. I'm going to immerse myself as much as my feeble little mind can wrap itself around some of these concepts and the narrative will emerge.""

Spielberg, who's currently working on the fourth installment of the ""Indiana Jones"" saga scripted by David Koepp, has a long history of exploring the sci-fi realm.

This would be the first time, however, that Spielberg does not remain Earthbound. ""Interstellar"" has been described as an effects-laden exploration in the tradition of ""2001: A Space Odyssey,"" written by Arthur C. Clarke and original ""A.I."" developer Stanley Kubrick.

""The truth is, since I watched 'Close Encounters' when I was probably 7 or 8, I've been waiting for Mr. Spielberg to make this movie,"" says Nolan, now 30. ""That I have anything to do with it is mind-blowing.""

Source: LA Times"