Our work on gravitational lensing by black holes began in May 2013, when Christopher Nolan asked us to collaborate on building realistic images of a spinning black hole and its disk, with IMAX resolution, for his science fiction movie Interstellar. We saw this not only as an opportunity to bring realistic black holes into the Hollywood arena, but also an opportunity to create a simulation code capable of exploring a black hole’s lensing with a level of image smoothness and dynamics not previously available.
