Ray Romano and Brad Garrett Walked Away From $250K After Classic Christopher Nolan Question

About a year ago, Ray Romano and Brad Garrett teamed up on Celebrity Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, cruising through questions until they hit a wall at the $250,000 mark. The question stumped them, and it was all about a Christopher Nolan movie.

Nolan’s a big deal—most folks love his work, from The Dark Knight to Dunkirk. But when Ray and Brad faced a question about one of his iconic films, they couldn’t crack it.The question was: To make a super realistic farm without any CGI, Christopher Nolan planted a 500-acre cornfield in western Canada for which movie?

The options were Oppenheimer, Tenet, Inception, or Interstellar. Brad, joking around, threw out “Field of Dreams” before the choices even popped up.

Ray thought it was either Inception or Interstellar but leaned toward Inception. They didn’t risk it, walking away with $125,000. The right answer? Interstellar. Fun fact: Ray’s been on the show three times and never made it past the $250,000 question, according to the episode’s notes.

Christopher Nolan, the director behind Interstellar, hates using CGI. In 2014, he took on a new role: corn farmer. For his 2014 sci-fi flick Interstellar, Nolan wanted everything to look real. The movie, starring Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned farmer, dives into a future where Earth might not be livable anymore. Cooper leads a team to find a new planet for humans.

The script called for a farm surrounded by cornfields and mountains, but finding that spot was tough. So, Nolan, inspired by Zack Snyder’s corn-growing for Man of Steel, decided to plant 500 acres of corn near Calgary, Canada. It cost $100,000, a small chunk of the movie’s $165 million budget, but it was a gamble. What if the crops failed during filming?Nolan was all in on making the sci-fi doomsday vibe feel real.

In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, he said, “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.”

The effort paid off—literally. The corn that wasn’t wrecked during filming was sold, raking in about $162,000, according to reports.

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