What are some of the most fascinating instances of attention to detail in movies?

Forget all these Easter Eggs! Christopher Nolan's Interstellar takes the cake.

Specifically, the kind of work that went into creating the fictional Black Hole, Gargantua.

​​Now, Nolan could have asked the VFX technicians to whip up a random black spinning mass and unless you were too keen, you'd have had no idea whether it was an actual representation of a Black Hole.

But being the perfectionist he is, he sought the help of Dr. Kip Thorne , the renowned Physicist (Who eventually became the Executive Producer for the film, giving expert advice on several other scientific aspects of the film). Thorne and the special effects team for Interstellar, Double Negative led by Paul Franklin worked closely together.

​Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, who then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena.

In addition, Thorne wrote pages of formulae himself and drew representations to help the VFX team "visualize" a Black Hole exactly the way it would appear in the real world.

Example: Kip Thorne's representation of how a Black Hole 'distorts' light

​This wasn't an easy feat. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to 800 terabytes of data. The entire process took almost a year to perfect.

Mini-Documentary: Building a Black Hole

What more? The resulting VFX provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community:

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black holes in Astrophysics and in the movie Interstellar:

Visualizing Interstellar's Wormhole: 

Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a Black Hole would not be easily achieved for the common audience. However, Nolan found the finished effect to be explainable provided that he maintained consistent camera perspectives: "As long as we didn't change the point of view/the camera position too much, we could get something very understandable."

But do you know how much screen time Gargantua gets in the film? Close to 1 minute.

That's right! All this trouble for just 1 minute of video!

Interstellar: "Gargantua" Scene

Gargantua makes its debut much earlier in the movie. But this scene features it in at least two different angles.

If you haven't seen the movie, I hope by now I have convinced you to do so. If you have, watch it again! For when you look at Gargantua this time, you'll know that you're looking at almost an year's worth of hard work of the VFX technicians and the brilliant conviction of a genius.

Never before has an Oscar for Special Effects been more deserved.

No wonder we say "God is in the details".

1. In “Dr. Strangelove”, a satire about the United States government during the nuclear arms race with Russia, Kubrick insisted the table around which the government officials were sitting be made green to look like a poker table.This is symbolism that viewers would never be able to catch in 1964, a time of black and white movies.

2. A scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey takes place on the moon. No, they didn't film it on the moon, silly! They filmed it on Earth; it's just that nobody told Kubrick that. He insisted that all of the equipment on screen be built to actually work on the actual moon anyway.

The instructions for the zero-gravity Toilet can still be found on internet(The Zero Gravity Toilet)

3. For the shooting of Dr. Strangelove  The sets occupied the B-52 Stratofortress bomber. Lacking cooperation from the Pentagon in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52, and relating this to the geometry of the B-52's fuselage. The B-52 was state-of-the-art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off-limits to the film crew. When some United States Air Force personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that "it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which was the CRM."

It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned whether Ken Adam's production design team had done all of their research legally, fearing a possible investigation by the FBI.

4. Michael Mann's 2009 film, Public Enemies, was made on actual locations where Dillinger's gang raided banks and uses authentic weapons of the period.Mann insisted on staging the climactic shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in the exact spot where it happened. "We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had," gushed the director.

5. The Thief And The Cobbler (1993) was released in the same year as Aladdin.While Aladdin employed cutting edge CGI, every frame of Williams' remarkably elaborate film was drawn by hand. As a result, it was in production for more than 30 years, a world record to this day.

6.The scene in Matrix in which Morpheus attempts to train Neo's attention (he is distracted by a blonde in a red dress and ends up shot in the face) is populated entirely by doppelgangers, included to demonstrate Mouse's laziness in cutting corners on his programming. For this the Wachowskis spent several days in Sydney (where the scene was shot) tracking down identical twins specifically for this sequence.