Early in pre-production, Dr. Kip Thorne laid down two guidelines to strictly follow: nothing would violate established physical laws, and that all the wild speculations would spring from science, and not from the creative mind of a screenwriter. Writer, Producer, and Director Sir Christopher Nolan accepted these terms, as long as they did not get in the way of the making of the movie. That did not prevent clashes, though; at one point Thorne spent two weeks talking Nolan out of an idea about travelling faster than light.
For a cornfield scene, Sir Christopher Nolan sought to grow five hundred acres of corn, which he learned was feasible from his producing of L'uomo d'acciaio (2013). The corn was then sold, and actually made a profit.
The method of space travel in this movie was based on physicist Dr. Kip Thorne's works, which were also the basis for the method of space travel in Carl Sagan's novel "Contact", and the resulting movie adaptation, Contact (1997). Matthew McConaughey starred in both movies.
According to Dr. Kip Thorne, the largest degree of creative license in this movie are the clouds of the ice planet, which are structures that probably go beyond the material strength which ice would be able to support.
Composer Hans Zimmer was instructed by Sir Christopher Nolan to make a unique score: "it's time to reinvent. The endless string ostinatos need to go by the wayside, the big drums are probably in the bin." Nolan did not provide Zimmer a script or any plot details for writing music for the film, and instead gave the composer "one page of text" that "had more to do with Zimmer's story than the plot of the movie."