Ray Romano & Brad Garrett Lost $250K Over Tricky Christopher Nolan Question

Almost a year ago, Ray Romano and Brad Garrett teamed up for an episode of Celebrity Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The two were doing great, making their way up the ladder without much trouble, until they reached the $250,000 question. That’s when things got tricky.

The question they faced was: “To create a realistic-looking farm without using CGI, Christopher Nolan had a 500-acre cornfield planted in western Canada for which of his films?”

The options were Oppenheimer, Tenet, Inception, and Interstellar. Before the answers even popped up, Brad Garrett joked, “Field of Dreams.” Romano thought it was either C or D. But instead of risking it, the two decided to walk away with $125,000. If they had to guess, they would have gone with Inception. Unfortunately, the right answer was Interstellar.

Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar, is famous for avoiding CGI whenever possible. Known for his visually stunning work in films like The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Dunkirk, Nolan likes to keep things as real as he can.

In 2014, while making Interstellar, Nolan added a surprising new skill to his list: farming. More specifically, corn farming. In the movie, Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned farmer who leads a space mission to find another planet for humanity.

Nolan wanted Cooper’s farm to look as real as possible. The script called for a large cornfield surrounded by mountains, but finding such a location was nearly impossible. So, Nolan decided to make one himself.

Taking inspiration from director Zack Snyder, who had grown corn for Man of Steel, Nolan planted a massive 500-acre cornfield near Calgary, Canada. The cost was about $100,000, which was small compared to the film’s $165 million budget, but it was still a risk. There was no guarantee the corn would grow well enough for filming.

In an interview, Nolan said he was fascinated by the idea of showing a large-scale sci-fi doomsday scenario in a realistic way. “It looked like the Ken Burns film about the Dust Bowl that he did for PBS, which was really a remarkable piece of work. We really had to scale back from the reality of what those things were actually like in the Dust Bowl because you look at the photographs, and it actually seems too crazy,” he said.

In the end, the gamble paid off. Not only did the cornfield look great on screen, but according to reports, the leftover corn that wasn’t destroyed during filming was sold for a profit. Nolan and the studio made around $162,000 from the sale.

And here’s one more fun fact: In all three times Romano has been on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he’s never made it past the $250,000 question.

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