Remember when we hardly knew anything about Interstellar?  Good times.  Now we're in the midst of the full-blown marketing blitz that will continue until the movie is released in a little over a month.  Thankfully, the marketing thus far hasn't really given away anything about the plot other than the need to save mankind by finding a new home amongst the cosmos.  Beyond that, what we've really got is the tone of the movie, and we now have four new TV spots that contain new footage, but it doesn't tell us much about the story.  For example, what's that weird, walking monolith thing?  I don't know, and I don't want to know until I see the movie.

Hit the jump to check out the new Interstellar TV spots, and for what Christopher Nolan had to say about the movie's influences.  The film stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica ChastainCasey AffleckMichael Caine, David OyelowoWes BentleyJohn LithgowEllen BurstynTopher GraceDavid GyasiMackenzie FoyBill IrwinTimothée Chalamet and Matt DamonInterstellar opens November 7th.

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We knew Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey would be a major influence on the movie, but in a recent interview with Empire [via The Playlist], Nolan pointed out some other touchstones:

"It's not straight action and it's not straight thriller," Nolan says about the tone of his movie. "I do liken it to the blockbusters I grew up with as a kid. A lot of them by Spielberg. I don't like talking about Spielberg too much because he was the director on the project before me and I don't want to keep coming back to that, but the truth is, there's a great spirit to films like 'Close Encounters [Of The Third Kind]' and 'Jaws' that I really wanted to try and capture, because I haven't seen it in a very long time."

However, Nolan wanted to make clear that he wasn't trying to ape those movies like another director:

"I mean, J.J. [Abrams] paid great homage to it in 'Super 8,' but it was a very literal homage. We're trying to do: 'What would that kind of film be now? Not in that period, as J.J. did, but now. It's been a really interesting challenge," Nolan added. "When you say you're making a family film, it has all these pejorative connotations that it'll be somehow soft. But when I was a kid, these were family films in the best sense, and they were as edgy and incisive and challenging as anything else on the blockbuster spectrum. I wanted to bring that back in some way."

I think what we've seen (at least through the lens of the trailers) supports that as the relationship between McConaughey's character and his daughter show a family struggle that echoes Roy Neary's in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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In addition to trying to update the tone of Spielberg's classics for the present day, Nolan also gave credit to Philip Kaufman's 1983 historical epic The Right Stuff, which was about U.S. space program leading up to sending a man into orbit:

"You can't pretend '2001' doesn't exist when you're making 'Interstellar,' " Nolan admits. "But the other film I'd have to point to is 'The Right Stuff.' I screened a print of it for the crew before we started, because that's a film that not enough people have seen on the big screen. It's an almost perfectly made film. It's one of the great American movies and people don't quite realise how great it is — probably because it's four hours long!"

If Interstellar turns out to be great, hopefully people will be able to recognize it since his movie is almost three hours long.

Have a taste of those three hours with these brief TV spots [via SHH]: