The Corn Supremacy: An Expert Rates Crops From 'Interstellar,' 'The Wizard of Oz,' and More
Like many directors before him, Christopher Nolan has embraced the cinematic power of cornfields. In Nolan’s new sci-fi epic Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey plays a farmer who grows corn, one of the last viable crops on future Earth. Those green stalks look great on camera, but how does an actual farmer rate McConaughey’s crop? Yahoo Movies asked farmer Gregg Pulver, who grows about twelve hundred acres of corn every year in upstate New York, to comment on the cornfield scenes in Interstellar, Field of Dreams, North by Northwest, and six other starchy films.
Interstellar (2014)
“The corn we’re seeing is obviously good corn,” Pulver says, although he is does call out one scene near the end when someone sets a field on fire. “The one thing is that corn would have a hard time burning, especially green corn that’s not fully matured, because there’s so much moisture content in it that it wouldn’t just spontaneously combust the way it does in the trailer. Soybeans, wheat fields, all notorious for catching on fire. Not too many cornfields, and none that I know of that are still not fully ripened, do that. But it is a science fiction movie.”
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Not surprisingly, you definitely don’t want to be running from a serial killer in a cornfield. “Do you see them running through crosswise in the cornfield? Well, it’s almost impossible to run through a cornfield that way,” Pulver says. “Typically every row is 30 inches apart, and the cornstalks in those rows are six-and-a-half to seven inches apart. So you can go up and down the row, but to go crossway against the rows, you’d fall a million times. I’m not sure it would be the nicest place to have a party, either.”
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Signs (2002)
Forget the mysterious crop circles and check out those stalks! “The crop circle myth has been debunked, but that corn all looks beautiful,” he says. “This is actually the best representation, I think, of normal field corn. It’s really beautiful stuff.”
Twister (1996)
Both Twister and Interstellar have scenes of people driving wildly through cornfields, something Pulver says isn’t likely to ever happen. “Driving through a cornfield in a car is almost impossible,” he says. “There’s just so much trash, so many of your stalks and everything would get underneath your car, and your drive lines and everything else would just twist up. We had a person who actually ran off the road and drove into one of our cornfields once, and didn’t make it all that far. Even following the rows, you’d still get lost almost immediately. You can’t see, because everything around you is twelve or fourteen feet tall.”
Casino (1995)
Joe Pesci’s character meets a grisly end in a cornfield, but Pulver says it’s an illogical spot for a Mafia dumping ground. “Why would you bury somebody in the middle of a cornfield?” he says. “You could dig a gravesite, but within two or three weeks, the farmer’s going to be in there harvesting it, so they would find the bodies. If I was going to hide a body, it wouldn’t be in a cornfield, I’ll tell you that.”
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Field of Dreams (1989)
Kevin Costner’s novice farmer might not really know what to do with his farm tools yet. “I have no clue why he’s out in the middle of his cornfield with a hoe or whatever he’s carrying there. On a large scale farm, there are very few times you would do that. There may be an invasive weed or two that you would find and you’d want to get it out, but you wouldn’t just be walking through your cornfield with a hoe,” says Pulver. “The premise of Field of Dreams is great, but in reality, anybody would wait to build their baseball field until after the crop was in. That would make much more sense.”
North by Northwest (1959)
Pulver says the focal point of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic cornfield scene doesn’t make much sense. “There’s no reason why a crop duster would be up in the air at that time of year anyway, but that’s beside the point,” he says. “This corn doesn’t look good. It looks like it’s drought-stressed. It looks like the rest of the corn was harvested in the area and they left this patch, and as corn weathers during the year, especially back then, it would break off and topple over. It would probably be not a great place to hide from bullets.”
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Oklahoma! (1955)
Even the corn is a throwback in this adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical. “Obviously the corn is very nice, though it isn’t what we would consider a modern breed of corn,” says Pulver. “It looks like an open-pollinated corn, rather than the hybrid-type situation that we would normally see in this day and age. If you shot it today in the same cornfield, it would look totally different, even if they used the same technique and same camera.”
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The Wizard of Oz’s cornfield might be faked, but it still has some basis in truth. “Obviously the scene wasn’t shot outdoors, so this one’s a little bit out of the realm of the rest of them,” he says. “But that’s sweet corn, whereas the other clips look like regular old field corn.”
Photo credit: @Thinkstock
