What Is Christopher Nolan About?

This week we’re talking about the filmography of one of the 21st century’s most popular and influential movie directors— it’s Christopher Nolan. You can expect a couple deep-dives, a tangent or two, and at the end we’ll decide once and for all: What Was That About?

Transcript

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I'm Elliot Peters, and this is What Was That About? A show that tries to get the point of every movie. Today we're talking about the filmography of one of the 21st century's most popular and influential blockbuster movie directors. It's Christopher Nolan. You can expect a couple deep dives, a tangent or two, and at the end we'll decide once and for all what was that about. All that and more after this quick intro. Hello everybody, welcome back. Today we're talking about Sir Christopher Edward Nolan. This guy has been a mainstay in American cinema for the last 20 years. He's really a flagship. Anytime that a new Christopher Nolan movie comes out, it's a really big deal for the box office and for the general audiences. Of course, he's most well known for his Batman movies, which came out from 2005 to 2012 and starred Christian Bale, but the rest of his filmography is beloved by a lot of film fans, and he has definitely what I would consider to be a cult following, especially online. A lot of young men look up to this guy. Sir Christopher Nolan is a British and American filmmaker. As a significant auteur of his generation, he has established himself as a major figure of 21st century Hollywood. His films have earned over $6 billion worldwide, making him the seventh highest grossing film director of all time. Nolan's accolades include two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and two British Academy Film Awards. He was appointed as a CBE in 2019 and was knighted in 2024 for his contributions to film. Nolan developed an interest in filmmaking from a young age. After studying English literature at University College London, he made several short films before his feature film debut with Following in 1998. Nolan gained international recognition soon after and eventually transitioned into studio filmmaking. Three of Christopher Nolan's films have been inducted into the National Film Registry. Infused with a metaphysical outlook, his works thematize epistemology, existentialism, ethics, the construction of time, and the malleable nature of memory and personal identity. They feature mathematically inspired images and concepts, unconventional narrative structures, practical special effects, experimental soundscapes, large format film photography, and materialistic perspectives. We'll get further into the large format proclivities of Christopher Nolan and how he really champions IMAX photography, especially in the latter half of his career, was really interesting since he did come from very humble beginnings in terms of like the size of and scope of his movies. He is known now for making these huge epics, and what he really started out with was much, much more intimate, focused, and dialed in what I would consider to be like budget stretchers, like really small productions that make huge use of very little money. And I think that's why studios really trust him to handle huge budgets now. I mean the Odyssey has an absolutely monumental budget, but these studios really trust him to use this much money. I mean, Oppenheimer, you know, that was a huge movie. By no means should a period piece that features lots of different scenes of people talking about quantum mechanics in different rooms have made a billion dollars at the box office, but here we are. I believe that my first Christopher Nolan movie was Batman Begins. And I think that that's probably true of a lot of people in my generation who grew up during the like prime age of superhero cinema in the 2010s is really when, you know, I started to develop a taste in film. And so obviously I I started out with with those movies, but very soon after that I think I encountered Memento, and and that's probably the best entry point next to Batman. If you want somebody to appreciate what he's going for as a filmmaker, Memento is a great place to start. When looking at the the filmography of an author, look at their very, very early stuff, honestly, a lot of the time I kind of prefer that work because it's the type of thing that they make under pressure, you know? There's a tendency as the budgets start ballooning and public trust starts increasing to sort of indulge in areas of filmmaking and storytelling that aren't as raw or aren't as uh true. Um, but the the early work of a filmmaker is generally some of their most honest stuff, and I definitely think that that's true of Chris Nolan. I think that there is, as I previously mentioned, a bit of a cult following for him, and I don't necessarily think of myself as falling into that crowd, because there there are a lot of people that kind of revere him as this master storyteller, and there are there are holes in his ability as a filmmaker and as a writer in particular, um, but you can't deny that he knows how to craft an experience for the general audience, and that is something that is really in demand these days, especially as people are hungry for original stories, we want to go to the movie theater and experience something that we've never seen before with a huge crowd. Christopher Nolan remains a draw, and for that reason I I really appreciate what he has contributed to cinema. And yes, all of that is very much like my outside perspective on him as a person, but his movies on an individual level I also really enjoy. There's some really inspirational uh technique and craft that has to be admired and has been a huge influence on me as a young adult, and definitely contributed to my taste in cinema. His career trajectory going forward is going to be very interesting to see. Obviously, I'm recording this in the days preceding the release of the Odyssey. We'll see how that movie is received later this week. As of right now, I I think he occupies a very interesting space in terms of you know, the first movies that a filmmaker makes right after their like huge Academy Award-winning film are very telling. It's a brand new blank check for him. I mean, there's not very much at risk because he's still going to remain a box office draw. There's definitely a door open here for him to do something really, really interesting. Of course, film is the most collaborative of all modern art forms, and there are many supporting players in this man's filmography. We're gonna tackle every film that Christopher Nolan has released over his multi-decade career, but he's not a one-man army putting these things together. There are a key few creatives that have gone undervalued by general audiences and in conversations about Christopher Nolan and his work, and so these are the people that have really brought his vision to life for him over the years. The first person I want to talk about is Wally Fister. Wally is Nolan's first partnership with a cinematographer. His very first feature film was shot entirely by himself, but immediately afterwards with Memento, his second film, Wally Pfister came on board, and the two of them worked together from around 2000 to 2012 through all of the Batman movies that were released by Warner Brothers. Wally Pister really contributes a huge amount to Christopher Nolan's visual style, which is one of the main things that people talk about when they talk about Chris Nolan movies because they're very much spectacle-oriented, you know? Eventually, following The Dark Knight Rises, Wally Pister transitioned into directing and ultimately has retired from filmmaking. And that leads me to the second person that I think I need to talk about, and that is Hoida van Hoydema. Hoyda is Nolan's second and current partnership with the cinematographer. They've worked together since 2014's Interstellar. Separate from Christopher Nolan, Van Hoydema is known for work on the movie Her, which was directed by Spike Jones, the Bond film Spectre, directed by Sam Mendez, he was the cinematographer for Ad Astra, that sci-fi movie with Brad Pitt, directed by James Gray. And in the 2020s, Van Hoydema also worked on Nope, which was directed by Jordan Peel. And that movie is absolutely beautiful. Van Hoydema designed and invented some brand new kinds of nighttime photography for that film. So he's really he's a genius, he's a true visual genius. And you can see with Christopher Nolan's collaborations with Van Hoydema this movement towards a large film format, uh 70 millimeter IMAX film format in in their later films together. So that covers Nolan's primary collaborators behind the camera, but he also has some people that have helped to shape his vision in the editing room as well. Dodie Dorn worked with Chris Nolan on multiple movies in his early career. She's also known for Kingdom of Heaven, the Ridley Scott Epic, and Australia, which was directed by Baz Luhrmann. Then there's Lee Smith, who edited a huge, huge chunk of Chris Nolan movies right in the middle. Lee Smith edited The Truman Show in 1917. He came on board as Nolan's editor with Batman Begins in 2005, and he stayed on until Dunkirk in 2017. And then there is Nolan's current partnership with a film editor, Jennifer Lame, who won an Oscar for Best Film Editing for her work on Oppenheimer. Jennifer has worked on films like Hereditary, Manchester by the Sea, and Marriage Story. She is a brilliant film editor, and editing plays a very, very important key role in the audience experience of a Christopher Nolan movie because so many of them are told in this like non-linear narrative, layering different plot lines over each other. The editor really, really is in control of how the audience experiences those aspects of the story. Additionally, uh perhaps the longest-running collaboration in Christopher Nolan's career is with his brother Jonathan Nolan. They worked on many screenplays and the underlying stories behind screenplays together, and he has perhaps contributed the most out of any collaborator over the decades. So let's go through the filmography here and kind of start to identify key themes or visual ideas that are being communicated through all of the movies and developed over time. Christopher Nolan directed a couple of short films that he took to festivals in the early 90s, but his feature film debut was with a film called Following, which was released in 1998. Christopher Nolan handled the cinematography himself on this film, which is it's an outlier in that respect. All his other movies were uh photographed by collaborators, but because of that, we're able to identify very concretely which of the visual ideas are really very much Nolan's sensibilities as an artist as opposed to any of his cinematographers. And it's it's really interesting watching this movie, having seen other Chris Nolan movies and seeing the kind of fledgling ideas presented here. It was also co-edited by Chris Nolan with Gareth Heal, and so for that reason, again, you can really see his hand in the editing room and the choices that he makes in terms of presenting this nonlinear narrative. It has music by frequent early Christopher Nolan collaborator David Julian, and it was distributed by Momentum Pictures, which was a small independent film label which was um folded into Entertainment One in 2013, and then Entertainment One was purchased by Lionsgate 10 years later in 2023. So Moment Pictures doesn't really exist anymore in the way that it did in 1998. Following follows Bill, an idle, unemployed, aspiring writer who walks the crowded streets of London following randomly chosen strangers, a seemingly innocent entertainment that becomes dangerous when he crosses paths with a mysterious character. This movie is very much like a neon noir type of mystery, and the nonlinear narrative here presents certain plot lines completely out of order in a way that juxtaposes different moments against each other and forces the audience to piece the whole narrative together bit by bit. A telltale bit of Christopher Nolan filmmaking that he revisits again and again and again. I will point out as we go through each of the movies which ones have non-linear narratives, and you'll notice that very, very few of them have linear narratives at all. And even those ones have flashbacks and dreams and plot lines inside of other plot lines, so he's always playing with the way that the story is presented. Following was shot over the course of one year on weekends to plan around the work schedules of all of the actors and crew members because everybody working on this movie was friends of Chris Nolan who had full-time jobs at the time. It was very much a labor of love that was cobbled together in everybody's spare time, and it was shot in the homes of friends and family members. Additionally, Nolan paid for the film stock that it was shot on out of pocket. He took that out of his salary. The 16mm black and white film allowed them to shoot with almost entirely available light. They didn't have to color match anything from shot to shot. The fact that Christopher Nolan, who is so well known these days for shooting on the largest film formats available, chose to shoot his first feature film on 16mm, a commercially available prosumer type of a film stock that has very textured grain, really small image, um, is really interesting and it's it's kind of ironic, but it also makes it so that you know you can see what his sensibilities about where to put the camera are um in terms of you know, like how how he will compose a shot. And Chris Nolan gets some flack for having very weak composition choices or or a lack of mise en scene. I mean, he's not like Stanley Kubrick, he's not organizing the image uh to be artistically um motivated. A lot of stuff is very incidental to him, and he's said recently in an interview that he almost thinks more in terms of like where to place the camera in three-dimensional space in relation to the other things that he's photographing than he thinks about what's in frame, which is a very unique perspective to have as a filmmaker. No one else really thinks that way, and it may be his greatest weakness, but I think that with following, it's interesting that the the film that's shot in the smallest film format is one where I think he's paying a lot of attention to composition. Of course, as I already mentioned, the nonlinear narrative, his textbook Nolan, he had this to say about following in a retrospective interview. In a compelling story of this genre, that is Neo Noir, we are continually being asked to rethink our assessment of the relationship between the various characters. And I decided to structure my story in such a way as to emphasize the audience's incomplete understanding of each new scene as it is first presented. The central character of following kind of gets himself into situations that create a very interesting plot dynamic. I think that that's one of the most uh interesting and compelling aspects of Chris Nolan's second film, Memento, which we'll talk about now. Memento came out in 2000. This film was written by Christopher Nolan, but it was based on a short story called Memento Mori by his brother Jonathan Nolan. Memento stars Guy Pierce, Carrie Ann Moss, huge step up in terms of the casting. You know, Nolan had to work with unknowns and people that he knew personally with following. Cinematography here is by Wally Fister, so this is their first collaboration, first of many that we'll see moving forward. And it was edited by Dodie Dorn, so again, first collaboration between those two as well. The music is again by David Julian, who scored a lot of Chris Nolan's early movies, and this one was distributed by New Market, which is a now defunct indie film label. Memento follows Leonard Shelby, played by Guy Pierce, who is tracking down the man who murdered his wife. The difficulty of locating his wife's killer, however, is compounded by the fact that he suffers from a rare, untreatable form of short-term memory loss. Although he can recall details of life before his accident, Leonard cannot remember what happened 15 minutes ago, where he's going, or why. I would say that personally, I think Memento is my favorite of Christopher Nolan's movies. Because of many of the reasons that I put forward earlier in the episode, I think that Memento is dealing very intimately with some truths, some themes and some ideas that are intrinsic to Christopher Nolan's voice as a filmmaker. And the limitation, again, this is a it's a step up from following, but it's still a much smaller production than some of his later stuff. And those limitations are strict borders within which he has to draw, you know? And so because of that, we get this very, very vivid story. It's a gripping story, it's an intelligent and entertaining story, and it's dealing very, very truthfully with some story ideas that I think are able to get lost in all of the spectacle and grandiosity of the epic stories. So again, Memento is a story about a guy who gets himself into a situation and doesn't fully realize it until it's way too late. Or in the case of Memento, you know, he he kind of doesn't realize it. That's part of what makes this one so so unique. And the nonlinear narrative here is ingenious because there's two plot lines that are overlaid on top of each other. Every time we cut in between the two of them, it's clear which one is which because one is shot in black and white, one is shot in color. The black and white sequences are all arranged in order, and the color ones are all playing in reverse order. And then they meet in the middle at the very, very end. It's a very confusing experience the first time you watch it, but eventually you start to like get the hang of it. I remember the first time I watched this when that shoe dropped and I realized what was happening. I realized that I was watching all the color sequences in reverse order. Something clicked and it became so engrossing to watch the final moments of the movie because I, you know, you're like trying to remember what happened at the beginning so that you can try to predict what's about to happen at the end. The way that the story treats the audience as intelligence, it's really rewarding as an audience member to feel like I'm trusted. And that's something that I really value about Christopher Nolan's movies, is that I feel like I'm invited to participate. The next film in his filmography is Insomnia, which was released in 2002. I won't be able to go into too much detail about Insomnia, because this is the only Christopher Nolan movie I have not watched. So you'll have to let me know if I'm really missing out. Maybe leave a comment if you're watching this on YouTube. But this film was written by Hilary Seitz, and it's an outlier in that it's based on a Norwegian film of the same name. This is a remake of a movie from 1997. And because of that, it is the only film in Christopher Nolan's filmography that does not give him a writing credit. It stars Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank. The cinematography is again by Wally Pfister. It was edited by Dodie Dorn with music again by David Julian. Uh, but this film was Nolan's first big studio picture, and it was released by Warner Brothers. And you can see that in terms of the casting, obviously, right? Because they've got huge, huge names. I mean Al Pacino is like, you know, one of the greatest screen legends ever to live. Insomnia follows two Los Angeles homicide detectives who are dispatched to a northern town in Alaska where the sun doesn't set. They are tasked with investigating the methodical murder of a local teen. I'm honestly interested in maybe watching the Norwegian film first, because I know that it's got Stellan Skarsgard in it, and you gotta love the Skarsgards, so maybe I'll take a look at that and then I'll contrast it with Insomnia from Chris Nolan later. You know, see what's lifted, what's left behind. But then, of course, three years later in 2005, Nolan comes out with Batman Begins. This is a Batman movie, so as far as like an auteur sort of perspective on this thing, that doesn't really exist. This these movies are made by committee. These are among the very, very best Batman movies ever made, in no small part because they involve Christopher Nolan, but there are a lot of really, really brilliant artists that came together to build this. Some of them include Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Killian Murphy, David S. Goyer, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard. That's not to say that Christopher Nolan didn't bring along some of his collaborators. For instance, this film was again shot by Wally Pfister, so that visual identity carries through from Memento and Insomnia into the Batman universe. This movie, though, was the first of Christopher Nolan's movies to be edited by Lee Smith. That collaboration, again, continues on as long as Chris Nolan stays with Warner Brothers Pictures. The Han Zimmer soundtrack uh is brilliant. Some of the themes are composed by James Newton Howard. I'm not entirely sure about the background of how those two came together to work on this film, but I know that Hans Zimmer carried forward in the next two installments, and James Newton Howard did not. But this it marks the first collaboration between Zimmer and Nolan, and the two of them would go on to work on many other movies together, even to the point that Zimmer's protege, Ludwig Gorenson, is Nolan's most recent collaborator in terms of score, and Ludwig is going to be making the score for The Odyssey, which comes out later this week. Let's see. I guess I'll describe the plot of Batman. Driven by tragedy, billionaire Bruce Wayne dedicates his life to uncovering and defeating the corruption that plagues his home, Gotham City. Unable to work within the system, he instead creates a new identity, a symbol of fear for the criminal underworld, the Batman. So although this is a huge comic book movie created by an enormous team of artists, certain elements of Nolan's distinctive voice still appear. For instance, this movie has a nonlinear narrative. Especially in the first half. We're presented with flashback and plot line at the same time, they're overlapping, there's like three different timelines going on, and then they all come to a head by the time that Batman has kind of fully asserted himself as a vigilante force in Gotham City in the midpoint of the movie. But so that means that the first half of Batman Begins kind of feels like a montage that then gives way to a much more linear narrative in the second half of the movie. And Nolan's montagey sort of filmmaking, I I could see how that might be tiresome for some audience members, but there is a rhythm to it. Um and when you watch a lot of his movies, you start to get attuned to that rhythm and be able to recognize the the different plot lines as they're presented to you, and it becomes easier to follow. There's almost a learning curve to watching one of these movies. On top of that, I think Batman is an opportunity for Nolan to use an established mythological character to grapple with some ideas of identity and blame and guilt that are present in his earlier movies. And here is where Chris Nolan gets his first big blank check. So Batman comes out, obviously, it's a huge success because it's Batman, and it's a good movie, which helps. But because of that, Warner Brothers is like, Alright, well, here you go. You did one for us, now do one for you. Here's your check. Doubtlessly, that was worked into the contract at some point. Chris Nolan has an opportunity in 2006 to put out a completely different type. Of a movie, and this is very telling because the next movie that he releases is The Prestige. If you haven't seen The Prestige, I definitely recommend giving it a look. Because it's an underrated movie in Christopher Nolan's filmography. Because it came out sandwiched between two huge Batman movies. I think a lot of people forgot that it existed, but this movie has David Bowie in it, and he plays Nikola Tesla, so please go watch it. The Prestige was written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan together. It stars Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Cain, and Scarlett Johansson. It was shot again by Wally Pfister, edited by Lee Smith, with music by David Julian, and it was distributed by Buena Vista Entertainment in the US and Canada and Warner Brothers Pictures for the international market. The Prestige is a mysterious story of two magicians, whose intense rivalry leads them on a lifelong battle for supremacy, full of obsession, deceit, and jealousy, with dangerous and deadly consequences. Those two magicians are played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, and their kind of battle of wits is presented again in a nonlinear format. This time told through almost like a frame narrative of Michael Caine's character describing the way that a magic trick works. Because of that, the movie is almost attempting to structure itself like a magic trick. Some elements of that I think really work for me, other elements might not work quite so well, but the ending of this movie has to be seen to be believed, much like any good magic trick. It's an absolutely insane plot twist that is really built into the fabric of the rest of the story. That brings me to something that I really want to talk about with Chris Nolan, is that he has these plot twists, these third act plot twists that come up a lot. And he's able to pull them off really, really well. A plot twist is frequently something that can feel a little cheap or feel a little bit like an airport paperback mystery novel, you know, oh my god, the character that we thought was dead hasn't been dead the whole time. But a Christopher Nolan plot twist isn't like that. A lot of the times they feel very, very earned, and I think that that's down to the structuring and the plotting of the story. And the nonlinear narrative factors into that because you're able to juxtapose elements from later on in the plot with things earlier on in the plot, and that makes foreshadowing very, very interesting. I think the prestige is an excellent example of Nolan firing on all cylinders when it comes to a plot twist. If you haven't watched it, stop this episode and just go watch it right now. As previously mentioned, the prestige comes out right between two Batman movies. So right after this movie comes The Dark Knight in 2008, which is maybe the film that's going to be Christopher Nolan's legacy. I find it difficult to imagine him coming out from under the shadow of this movie in terms of the cultural impact that it had. Oppenheimer obviously was a huge, huge hit, but The Dark Knight is going to stick around forever. This film was written again by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan together. David S. Goyer gets a story by credit this time around, whereas he wrote part of the screenplay for the first Batman Begins. It stars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, and Maggie Gyllenhall. Cinematography by Wally Pister, edited by Lee Smith, music by Hans Zimmer, and distributed again by Warner Brothers Pictures. In The Dark Knight, Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to the reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as The Joker. And I think that The Dark Knight is a great example of something that is true of a lot of Chris Nolan movies, but that I don't think Christopher Nolan himself can get credit for. And that's the fact that a lot of these have really incredible performances. Masterful, brilliant actor work. Obviously, Heath Ledger is the one that comes to mind, um, but all of the actors in The Dark Knight are pulling their weight. I mean, this movie has Gary Goddamn Oldman. And yet, I don't necessarily think of Christopher Nolan as being like an actor's director. He builds stories that obviously are able to bring a lot out of them. But in terms of crafting complex character, I think a lot of that uh can be attributed to like almost the framework or playground that he affords them, more so than his ability to like draw a really good performance out of an individual. But so as much as the Dark Knight is going to be Christopher Nolan's legacy forever, it definitely is Heath Ledger's legacy. And that is why the Dark Knight is gonna stick around. Following the Dark Knight, uh we've got Inception, which, if we're following the one for them, one for me pattern, is another one of Christopher Nolan's One for Me catalog. This was written exclusively by Christopher Nolan, and it definitely bears the mark of being a trademark uh Christopher Nolan idea. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Marion Codyard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, and Killian Murphy. If it's not obvious already, Christopher Nolan has a penchant for creating these long-term collaborations with other artists that he carries with him from film to film, and that includes actors. And one such actor that kind of gets scooped up in the periphery of Christopher Nolan's filmography, and then eventually slowly starts to get incorporated more and more to the point that he leads a film is Killian Murphy, who shows up initially in Batman Begins almost as this bit part um antagonist, uh the the villain scarecrow, but Christopher Nolan almost seems to treat some of his films as a showcase for Killian Murphy to slowly show general audiences what he's capable of as an actor. And the first time that he's able to s really step out from the Scarecrow's Shadow is with Inception. He plays a very pivotal role in this movie, and his performance is really, really wonderful. It's incredible. And obviously he goes on to star in Oppenheimer and win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Um, but I think that that collaboration is very interesting, and it's something that I I don't think I've ever seen before, uh, where an actor starts out as a peripheral player in an early film and then slowly, over the course of their collaborations with a director, steps into the spotlight to the point of becoming a leading man. In Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Cobb, is a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. He's offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible. Inception. The implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious. This movie is a very heady sort of sci-fi concept, pun absolutely intended, where characters can enter into the dreams of other characters and influence their behavior by means of espionage and uh manipulation. The concept itself is wild and definitely not the type of thing that a studio would be willing to take such a big budgetary swing on if there wasn't an established director and writer already at the helm. And I think that it's really admirable that Christopher Nolan gets an opportunity to do something this huge and really, really goes for it. Because this movie gets weird. It gets very weird. I I think a lot of people are scared to admit how weird Inception gets. People talk about Chris Nolan as this like hyper serious Englishman who has a very stoic sort of masculinity about him and isn't able to write female characters, and some of those things are very true, especially the female characters part. But he he likes to have fun. I mean, he made three Batman movies, and we're calling this guy like hyper serious. Of course, they are the most serious of all the Batman movies, but I digress. Inception is a really weird, weird movie. Um, and that's part of what makes it so much fun for me as an audience member. I think that more people need to admit that. These movies are strange. They're not quite as highbrow entertainment as we'd perhaps like to believe they are. I also want to talk very briefly about Han Zimmer, because this is the point where Han Zimmer and Christopher Nolan's collaboration moves past the Batman days into something uh truly special, because the the score for Inception is insane. Zimmer is creating sounds that go on culturally to have a life of their own. That like deep thrumming boah synthesizer that appears in movie trailers even today really comes from Inception. It's like this this uh invented cinematic sound that Han Zimmer created. That guy's a real bona fide genius. For better or for worse, the proliferation of the boah sound into cinema is a very funny sort of side effect of the collaboration between these two giants. But nonetheless, I'm happy that it's happened because it gave us something like time from Inception. Perhaps one of the greatest bits of 2010 cinema scoring. This time, although the narrative is a tad more linear, Inception definitely feels like a feature-length montage because of all of the dreams inside of dreams. Characters go to sleep, uh, other characters go into their dream, and then all the characters inside of the dream fall asleep and go into another dream, and so cutting between all of those different concurrent plot lines, they're all happening simultaneously at differing rates of time. It's all a very complex sci-fi concept, so uh because of that, the the the plot ends up feeling non-linear even though it's still technically kind of linear. I don't know, the guy's a madman. But then soon after Inception, we return to Batman one final time with the Dark Knight Rises in 2012. Across the board agreed to be the weakest of the three. Uh the Dark Knight Rises is nonetheless a good time, and it also carries with it uh all of the same collaborators from the previous two movies. Part of what makes these three films so cohesive together is the fact that a lot of the same people worked on them over and over again. So it's written by Jonathan and Christopher again, it stars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and everybody else. The cinematography is by Wally Pister, the editor is Lee Smith, the music is Hans Simmer. And here I think I'll talk for a brief second about Christopher Nolan's relationship with Warner Brothers, because it really starts with uh Insomnia, if you'll remember. His very first studio-produced motion picture. So from the outset of his career, he is aligned with Warner Brothers, and this partnership lasted for over a decade, well over a decade, but it falls apart in a little bit, and I'll I'll tell you why when we get to the 2020s. Obviously, they they were willing to take some big swings for him, so it makes it that much odder that they kind of have this falling out later on. But let's return to the Dark Knight Rises. Following the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman assumes responsibility for Dent's crimes to protect the late attorney's reputation, and is subsequently hunted by the Gotham City Police Department. Eight years later, Batman encounters the mysterious Selena Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway, and the villainous Bane, played by Tom Hardy, who is a new terrorist leader trying to overwhelm Gotham's finest. The Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy. So now we've got two longtime Christopher Nolan collaborators really stepping into the spotlight. This is the first film that Anne Hathaway made with Christopher Nolan. She appears again in Interstellar and later this year in The Odyssey. And then there's Tom Hardy, who is in a bunch of Christopher Nolan movies, some of which we'll get to in a minute. Dark Knight Rises, despite being the weakest of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, still has a lot of the same visual elements. The IMAX stuff that's shot for this movie is absolutely insane. It's it's out of this world. And IMAX is Christopher Nolan's chosen film format. He shoots everything in IMAX, to the point that the Odyssey is the first motion picture to be shot entirely on IMAX film stock from start to finish. There's not a single frame of that upcoming movie that was shot on anything other than IMAX. Do I think that that's necessary in order to shoot something with a huge scope? Absolutely not. But he loves the stuff, and it also serves as this sort of meta draw that brings audiences to the cinemas because people go to the movies to watch the specific formats. Despite the fact that, you know, a lot of the differences between the different formats are completely superficial. We're sold on this idea of the premium experience, and Christopher Nolan is a great salesman when it comes to that. So following The Dark Knight Rises, I think Christopher Nolan is in a career position that is very similar to where he is right now. He is on top of the world, he's he's made multiple number one movies. The Dark Knight Rises concludes this trilogy, this whole career chapter of Chris Nolan's life. He has another opportunity to make one of those blank check movies, and with that blank check, he makes Interstellar. This is widely regarded as most people's favorite Chris Nolan movie. To put into perspective, on the film review website Letterboxd, where people can create accounts and review their favorite movies, the movie most likely to be found in somebody's top four picks is Interstellar. This movie was written as a collaboration between Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Ann Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, and Matt Damon. And here we have a long-term Christopher Nolan collaborator departing from the team. Because Wally Feister did not shoot Interstellar. The cinematography was instead handled by Hoyta van Hoydema. And you can really feel the difference in terms of the texture and the color and the way that light behaves in this movie versus Dark Knight Rises two years previous. Van Hoydema brings a different type of sensibility while still retaining a lot of the visual identity that makes it a Chris Nolan blockbuster. Despite the departure of the cinematographer, this movie was again edited by Lee Smith and has music by Hans Zimmer, and it was distributed by Paramount in the US and Warner Bros. internationally. So again, continuing that Warner Brothers collaboration. Interstellar follows the adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an Interstellar voyage. This movie has some elements of nonlinear narrative. For the most part, in the the middle section, it's all very linear, but that's not to say that it doesn't play with time, because a huge factor in Interstellar is time dilation and the way that time behaves differently in different gravitational fields and the way that quantum mechanics bends space-time. Again, another like big sci-fi concept, this one more perhaps commercially viable than something like Inception, because while Inception feels a little bit like a fairy tale, we go into people's dreams, Interstellar is a space movie, it's a space adventure. But that's not to say that there aren't still risks, huge, huge risks that are inherited in taking on a story like this, because it's almost a completely different type of risk. This movie tries to tackle certain elements of quantum mechanics in a very literal and very true to life fashion, to the point that they had to consult a lot of different scientists and a lot of different experts in order to very accurately depict something as huge and complex as a black hole through special effects. And the result is astonishing. It's simply astounding. In certain areas where the dialogue falters, the cinematography never, never does. And the images that you see in Interstellar are some of the best examples of cosmic scale represented on the big screen. He's really rivaling stuff like Kubrick's 2001 with this movie, despite this having a much more like blockbuster sensibility in terms of like the adventure and the storyline. And I know that I went on and on a little bit ago about how all the differences between the premium film formats are kind of superficial. But watching Interstellar and IMAX, that was an experience. That was something I will never forget. And I guess this brings me to another thing that I think a lot of people like to bring up when we talk about Christopher Nolan, and that's the sound mix in his movies. Because he gets a lot of flack for the fact that the dialogue is often completely buried underneath the music and the sound effects. And the hard truth that a lot of people can feel however they want about is that these movies are optimized for very, very loud movie theater viewing. You want to have that volume cranked all the way up because Christopher Nolan intends for the music and the sound effects to be bafflingly loud. Um, and at that level, the dialogue is fine. It's right in the middle, you can hear it totally, totally fine, and everything's clear. But you really do need to have your volume cranked all the way up to the point that it's rattling your whole house if you're watching at home. And that makes certain people uncomfortable, and that's totally fair. I will not forget my first experience of watching Interstellar, turn the volume all the way up. It was unfortunately 1 a.m., I'm very sorry to my neighbors. But Han Zimmer's score, the sound design, thrumming in the walls, the whole house felt like it was turning into Cooper's spaceship. Absolutely unbelievable sound design. And then Interstellar kind of marks Nolan's departure from Batman and his his movement more towards completely self-driven ideas. And so in 2017 he releases Dunkirk, which was completely written solo by him. And in terms of structure, this movie's textbook, Nolan, it's got a nonlinear narrative, it's got three different plot lines, one on the beach, one in the boats, one in the air, and they're all overlaid on top of each other. Again, the learning curve applies, you've gotta like watch for 15 to 30 minutes before you start to get a sense of what's going on. But beyond that, this is kind of unrecognizable as a Chris Nolan movie because it's like a period piece war epic. Most of his other movies are either contemporary or take place in the future. So the fact that Dunkirk is a period film is really interesting. This film made headlines for casting Harry Styles, who gives a good performance in it, but a bunch of the same collaborators are still around. Lee Smith is the same editor, Hoyda van Heudema is a cinematographer, music by Hans Zimmer, distributed by Warner Brothers. You get the idea. Dunkirk tells the story of the miraculous evacuation of Allied soldiers from Belgium, Britain, Canada, and France who were cut off and surrounded by the German army from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk between May 26th and June 4th of 1940 during World War II. The evacuation of Dunkirk is is really interesting as a uh a story for a war film because it is a retreat. It's almost like a military failure, but couched within that is this tale of the heroism of the common folk who came to the aid of these stranded military men and these really these young boys who were completely left out in the open. So, because of that, there's actually quite a lot of uh film that deals with Dunkirk. Uh Darkest Hours starring Gary Oldman comes to mind, which I believe came out, if not in the same year, around the same time. That film is fantastic. I mean, not to give you homework, but kind of worth viewing next to Dunkirk because they tell stories about the same event from completely different perspectives. Obviously, the visuals in Dunkirk are brilliant, but not much else stands out of uh from it. It's definitely, I think, a middle of the road type of a Christopher Nolan film. Dunkirk is not topping very many people's favorites list. But that's not to say that it's divisive. Unlike the next film in Christopher Nolan's filmography, which is Tenet, this movie came out in 2020 during the pandemic, and now it's finally time to talk about the fallout between Warner Bros. Pictures and Christopher Nolan, because this film was distributed by Warner Brothers, but not in the way that Nolan intended. Tenet was unceremoniously dumped onto HBO Max when it was fully intended to have a wide theatrical release. Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the movie theater experience for years, to the point that I would say that we're only just now starting to recoup what culturally we lost from that span of time. But Tendit is unfortunately one of the movies released during that period where things were just kind of getting taken to the back and thrown onto a streaming platform in order to try to like drive the bottom line up for investors and get people to uh pay for subscriptions to HBO Max and Disney Plus and Netflix and Hulu and yada yada yada. Because of that, Tendit has a really weird cultural footprint. A lot of people watched it at home, and again, because you know the home viewing experience of a Christopher Nolan movie means that you can't hear the dialogue and you can hear the sound effects and music really loud, a lot of people do not get this movie. And that's not to say that it's like, oh, if you turn the volume up, you would totally be able to follow it. It is very convoluted, and that's on purpose. Because Tenet's almost like an experiment. It's Christopher Nolan's opportunity to fully fold the nonlinear storytelling into the literal nature of what's happening in the story, so that for the first time since maybe Memento, the characters are experiencing things nonlinearly in the same way that the audience is. And that makes for a very engrossing and confusing viewing experience. You almost need to have a notebook out while watching this, which, you know, maybe isn't best for like popcorn fair, but it's definitely admirable from a filmmaking perspective. I think that this is a huge swing. It is again a very heady sci-fi concept. Chris Nolan obviously loves science fiction, and that allows for the nonlinear narrative to play a role that it never did before and never has since. Tenet stars John David Washington, who is an underrated talent, and Robert Pattinson with Elizabeth De Bicky, Michael Cain, and Kenneth Brana. It was shot again by Hoyta Van Hordema, with editing by Jennifer Lame, who now takes over from Lee Smith. And this was the first collaboration between Christopher Nolan and Ludwig Gorensen. Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the protagonist, who is unnamed in the movie, journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. As much as Tenet is kind of an evolution of Christopher Nolan's filmmaking style, it's also visiting some ideas from very, very early on in his filmography. The fact that the protagonist is unnamed is something that Tennet shares in common with Following, Christopher Nolan's very first movie. The main character of Following says his name is Bill, but we are led to believe over the course of the story that that's a fake name that he's given. So we don't really know the name of the main character, and that's true of Tennet as well. And as long as we're talking about revisiting the naming conventions of characters, Inception shares something interesting with Following as well, in that the character of Cobb shares his name with this burglar character from Following. Very odd. Beyond the name, the characters really do not share anything in common. But the fact that all three of these movies are written solely by Christopher Nolan, with none of his other collaborators in the writing department, has me scratching my head because I'm I'm wondering if there's something I've missed, or if Christopher Nolan just hates naming characters and wants to reuse the same names over and over again, or just not name them at all. Of course, following Tennet in 2020, Christopher Nolan broke ties with Warner Brothers because they had directly violated their agreement with him to give the film a wide studio release. And so that meant that when it came time for Christopher Nolan to buckle up and get back in the director's chair for his Oscar Award winning multi hour biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, he took that script to Universal, who were happy to have him. They threw the doors open, and that's where he's been since. The Odyssey is going to be released by Universal as well, and I can only imagine. Imagine that the executives at Warner Brothers are gnashing their teeth, wishing that they had been there at the Oscar stage when Christopher Nolan was able to accept the award for Best Picture in 2023. But so that brings us to Oppenheimer. This movie was written exclusively by Christopher Nolan, although it is based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Byrd and Martin J. Sherwin. It stars Killian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., and Florence Pugh. Cinematography by Hoya van Hoydema, editing by Jennifer Lame, music by Ludwig Gorensen, and distributed by Universal Pictures. Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II. Obviously, by this point, Christopher Nolan has had over 20 years to refine his ability to tell a story in a nonlinear format. And I think that Oppenheimer is perhaps the most sophisticated use of nonlinear storytelling as a device, as a tool. It's borrowing from Memento in that some of the storylines are told in color and some in black and white. Although those different film stocks serve a different purpose than they did in Memento, in Oppenheimer, black and white is used almost as this objective perspective on things, whereas color is more of a subjective character-based perspective. Additionally, Oppenheimer, because it spans such a huge time period, has the monumental task of condensing down really several decades into a three-hour time frame. And three hours is a very long time for a movie, but the amount of history that the story is attempting to cover is truly staggering, and the fact that it it works, it totally works, and doesn't feel like it's diluting too much, it has to be commended. And I don't think that you can really tell the story in that satisfying of a way without sacrificing too much nuance. If you try to tell it linearly, it would have had to be spelled out for people, but because you're able to juxtapose the different elements from completely different points in time against one another in the moment, it makes it so that the complexity is able to stay intact. Beyond the editing, the large format, film photography is obviously spectacular. And it's really interesting that a filmmaker whose whole MO is kind of a huge blockbuster spectacle chose to make a film about discussions. Very, very tense discussions between very, very smart people, and it ends up becoming thrilling to adapt it that way. It makes me wish that more filmmakers would step out of their comfort zone and try to tell a story that's not aligned with their sensibilities and see what that lends to it. Because in this case, and maybe it's a rare case, but in this case it really, really works to apparently award-winning effect. So now three years have gone by, and we are about to see the release of the Odyssey. A lot of key players are returning. The cinematography is again by Hoyta van Hoydema, it's edited again by Jennifer Lame, with music by Ludwig Gorenson. Several frequent Christopher Nolan collaborators are returning to the cast, including Matt Damon, Ann Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Elliot Page, who have all worked with him before. When I first heard that this was going to be Christopher Nolan's next picture, it felt kind of inevitable, it felt correct. But because of that, I almost wonder if that's going to be the to the detriment of the movie, because it it is so already aligned with so much of what he tries to do. It makes me wonder if maybe it might feel like the most Christopher Nolan movie to ever be a Christopher Nolan movie, in a way that dampens the freshness. Because Oppenheimer felt remarkably fresh and sharp. But I reserve the right to withdraw those concerns if I see the movie on Thursday and absolutely love it. You'll have to stay tuned to find out. On the whole, Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker and as a storyteller seems remarkably interested in the concept of time, in the experience of sitting in a movie theater and having time wash over you or presented to you in unconventional ways. And more so than that sort of macro approach, he seems interested in what that says about the individual, about what happens when a person is plucked out of time or placed into a time in which they do not belong, or viewed at a particularly revealing angle through time that shows more about who they are underneath. He's one of the most influential film directors of the last 20 years, and I'm very much looking forward to the Odyssey. Thanks for being here. If you like the show and you want to help out, there are a few ways to do it. And the first option is completely free. Wherever you're listening, leave a quick review. It could be a short message, a passing thought, or a brief hello. One way or another, I'd love to hear from you. If you feel so inclined, feel free to hit the support the show link in the description of this episode. There you can donate however much you wish in order to help me keep this show alive. There are plenty of hidden costs to running a podcast. 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