In the first part of this talk, we will give a brief (but within the span of little more than a century) historic perspective and introduction to the interpolation theory and the commutant lifting theorem, and discuss its interactions with some classical problems in function theory and operator theory. In the second part of the talk, we will review similar problems in the setting of Drury-Arveson space, and then lift the idea to a more general setting which, in particular, will cover interpolation and commutant lifting for general reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces including the Hardy space, the Bergman space, and the weighted Bergman spaces.