2001: A Space Odyssey

Nolan has named it as the reference throughout Interstellar's production, and the film answers it point by point:

• TARS and CASE are written as the opposite of HAL 9000: plain-spoken, loyal, with a humour setting
• The wormhole passage is shot as a successor to the star gate sequence
• The tesseract ending puts a man in a constructed room outside time, as the hotel suite does
• Both use silence in vacuum rather than scored space action, which was still unusual in 2014

Scott has described 2001 as the film that raised the bar and, by his own account, made him want to work at that level of density. The debt is in the craft rather than the story: miniatures shot with long lenses and heavy atmosphere so the scale reads, interfaces that are diegetic and unexplained, and a pace that lets an audience look around a room. The graph already holds 2001 pointing at Alien on the same grounds; the Los Angeles of 2019 is the other end of the same design argument.

2001 established the used, industrial spacecraft that Alien took as its starting point and then made shabby. Kubrick's ships are clean and corporate; Ridley Scott's Nostromo is the same design language after twenty years of wear, with crew who complain about shares rather than marvel at the void. The silent exteriors and the slow docking grammar carry over intact.

Andrew Stanton has discussed the debt directly, and the film quotes it twice without disguise:

• The Axiom's autopilot turns on the crew exactly as HAL does, down to the single red eye
• Also sprach Zarathustra plays as the captain stands upright for the first time
• The first act is nearly wordless, which Stanton has attributed to watching silent film and 2001

The Strauss tone poem that opens the film is named after the book, and Kubrick chose it knowing what it was quoting. The borrowing goes past the music: Nietzsche's ape, man and overman is exactly the film's three-part shape, from the bone thrown at the Dawn of Man to the Star Child looking back at Earth. Kubrick and Clarke both discussed the film as being about the step after the human one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Also_sprach_Zarathustra_(Strauss)