HAVING worked together for nine years, including on their latest film, the science fiction blockbuster Interstellar, Sir Michael Caine and director Christopher Nolan have their relationship down to a fine art of yes and no.

"You spend your life as an actor making pictures wondering, 'Is it going to be a hit, is it going to be a miss?'" says Caine. "I've had six pictures from Christopher and every one has been a hit, so whenever he says ,'Do you want to do a movie?' I say, 'Yes.'"

When Nolan asks if Caine wants to read the script, the reply comes back: "No."

When your joint CV includes The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception and The Dark Knight Rises - some of the highest grossing movies of modern times - it doubtless breeds a certain amount of mutual confidence.

As he also writes as well as directs films, nothing with Nolan is as it seems, says Caine. Their working partnership began near the beginning of the 2000s, when the British director came to see Caine at home, telling him he had a movie in mind. On being told it was Batman, Caine was puzzled. I'm too old to be Batman, he thought, and on being told he would be playing a butler, Caine wondered if his dialogue would stretch to little more than telling folk dinner was served.

"He said, 'No Michael, read the script.' So I read the script and it wasn't the butler, it was a foster father for Batman. Nothing is what it seems with Chris."

The two were in London last week for the European premiere of Interstellar, which opens on Friday. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts, with Caine as a scientist back at mission control, Interstellar is set in a near future when the Earth is dying. With food running out, humankind must boldly go out into the universe in search of solutions.

Such a brief synopsis does not do justice to the epic scale on which Nolan's tale, co-written with brother Jonathan, plays out. It wasn't just in the space scenes that technical boundaries were pushed and what had hitherto seemed impossible became possible. Faced with the need to show how food was being grown in places where it normally would not, Nolan wanted a farmstead near a field of corn with mountains in the distance. So he found the mountains, then grew a field of corn (not personally, a rancher did it), and built a house. Oh, and a road too. No green screen for this director.

"With Chris, everything has to be practical and tangible," says brother Jonathan. "So, if you find yourself standing in a massive, fake corn field, beside a beautiful but totally fake farmhouse in the middle of a completely fake dust storm, that's when you know you are on a Chris Nolan movie."

Jonathan Nolan and Steven Spielberg had Interstellar initially, then Christopher Nolan took up the project. He was drawn to the fact that at its heart the film is about a father and his children, particularly his daughter, a budding scientist.

"I'm a father myself so I found that very powerful," says Nolan. When he took over the story this character, Murphy, had been a boy. "Mainly because my eldest child is a girl, I decided to change Murph into a girl. I found that that came very naturally to me - trying to write a relationship between a father and a daughter."

He liked the idea of using a family story to explore what it would be like if mankind was truly being faced with extinction.

"I grew up in the era that was really a golden age of blockbusters, with films from people like Spielberg. I loved the way something like Close Encounters addressed the moment when humans would meet aliens and addressed that from a family perspective, a very relatable human perspective. I really like the idea of trying to give today's audiences some sense of that form of storytelling."

Further adding to the sense that Interstellar is a family affair, the producer is Emma Thomas, Nolan's wife and long-time collaborator.

One of Nolan's earliest memories was going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey when he was seven years old.

"I've never forgotten the scale of that experience. I saw my first IMAX movie when I was 15 and immediately wanted to make features in that format at that point. For me, working on this scale has been a long-held dream."

Kubrick's classic was an influence on the film-makers, as was The Right Stuff and Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror. Also helping to steer the film as an adviser and executive producer was Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist whose work informs the story.

"Kip's long-held dream for the movie was to do a science-fiction movie based on the possibilities offered by real science," says Nolan. "I enjoy working that way because it wasn't a set of rules that were imposed on the storytelling, it was really about a set of possibilities; it was about what can real science offer us in terms of direction. The things that he was able to open up for me were far more exotic and surprising than anything I could have come up with as a screenwriter."

Thorne spent time with the cast, going through the science, and a real astronaut, Marsha Ivins, spoke to the actors about what it was like to live and work in space. The day before the European premiere, space catapulted into the news when an unmanned cargo rocket exploded in Virginia. Days later, the Virgin Galactic tragedy occurred.

"Every time a rocket blows up or something like that, we're reminded of the incredible bravery of these people and the extraordinary nature of this endeavour which requires resources from the entire world to put together," said Nolan, speaking before the Virgin Galactic crash.

"One of the things I love about space exploration is that it does represent the highest ambition of our collective endeavour to actually do something that difficult and get off this world and into the universe. It's an extraordinary thing. People are constantly being reminded of that."

Interstellar opens in cinemas on Friday in Digital 2D and IMAX