Before Christopher Nolan decided to make Interstellar his next movie after The Dark Knight Rises, Steven Spielberg was attached to direct with a screenplay from Jonathan Nolan. That didn’t work out though, and when Christopher officially came on board, he decided to rewrite his brother’s original screenplay.

During promotion for the upcoming DVD and Blu-ray release of Interstellar, Jonathan Nolan and the movie’s science adviser/producer Kip Thorne appeared at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab for a Q&A with fans.

When someone asked Jonathan about Interstellar’s divisive (and to some, extremely confusing) ending, the writer jokingly replied, “You’ve got the wrong brother.” According to Nerdist, his version apparently his had a “much more straight-forward ending ‘had the Einstien-Rosen bridge [colloquially, a wormhole] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back.’ So no tesseract (that was Christopher’s idea), no time manipulation, and no return home. Nolan didn’t elaborate on this point, but we might speculate that the original end to the movie was as dark and unforgiving as space.” That does sound pretty bleak!

It’s interesting to think about how the movie might have differed with an ending like this, and while the science was occasionally a little hard to follow, Interstellar’s actual ending was actually pretty brilliant.