A Visionary
Christopher Nolan, is a London-based director who is a rare breed that can create original stories on a massive scale. He’s also able to attract some of the best talent to work with him.
Inception’s multistoried dreamscape provides ample room for Nolan’s fixations: time and how it changes our perceptions, the human mind as both a tool and an object of horror and scientific innovation.
Background
At the age of 7, Nolan began making short films with his father’s Super-8 camera and studied filmmaking at University College London. He made his feature film debut with 1998’s Following, which he shot on a tiny budget of $6,000 in black-and-white and embraced a non-linear narrative structure that would become the cornerstone of his work.
Memento (2000) showcased the director’s emerging talent, earning him international recognition for his innovative use of cinematic form and narrative technique. The movie starred Guy Pearce as an insurance investigator with anterograde amnesia who provides clues to his memory loss by taking Polaroids and tattooing himself with important dates.
After the huge success of The Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan made a series of sprawling sci-fi epics that delved into the nature of time and space. Dunkirk (2017), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2022) all garnered critical acclaim, while Inception (2010) was a blockbuster smash hit. Nolan’s latest film, 2023’s Oppenheimer, follows the life of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who spearheaded the Manhattan Project and ushered in the nuclear age. The film includes a plethora of real-life elements such as romance, domestic turmoil, espionage, and a security hearing over communist ties.
Directing Career
Born to an American mother and British father, Nolan began making movies at a young age with his father’s Super-8 camera. He attended the University College London, where he created short films for the school’s film society.
Following, a 1998 neo-noir crime thriller about a restless writer who tails strangers for inspiration, earned Nolan acclaim at international film festivals and proved that he could craft larger-scale works. He followed up with Memento in 2000, which starred Guy Pearce as an insurance investigator suffering from anterograde amnesia.
Nolan has since produced blockbusters that have moved viewers to tears or entertained them with mind-bending action sequences. The Dark Knight trilogy grossed over $1 billion worldwide, and his Interstellar and Dunkirk shattered box office records. His latest, Oppenheimer, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, has shattered box office expectations and is one of Nolan’s biggest hits to date. He’s also the only director to have two films in the top 10 highest-grossing movies of all time.
Blockbusters
A Hollywood director whose films have raked in $5 billion at the box office across 11 pictures, Nolan has an unapologetic populist streak. He grew up on James Bond and Star Wars, but he turns those influences into tentpole blockbusters that seek to challenge the viewer’s brain.
Nolan has made the outsider journey to A-list filmmaking look easy. He made his black-and-white debut feature Following (1998) on a tight budget, then pulled off an inventive, almost revolutionary indie with Memento. Then he hit the jackpot with Batman Begins (2005), which ushered him into the studio system.
His next movie was a blockbuster with an edge, Inception (2010). In this mind-bending heist narrative, Leonardo DiCaprio’s master thief is tasked with planting an idea in the subconscious of a business heir (Cillian Murphy). The plan goes awry — and Nolan uses multiple levels of the subconscious as his canvas to explore the consequences. Christopher Nolan is also a philanthropist who serves on the board of Martin Scorsese’s film preservation nonprofit Film Foundation, and he was instrumental in helping bring back Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann this year.
Current Projects
His films, which all seem to come out within two or three years of one another, are a head trip, with dense plotting that’s filled with scientific theories and twists that require the viewer to pay close attention. Christopher Nolan also utilizes mathematically inspired images and concepts, unconventional narrative structures, practical special effects, experimental soundscapes and large-format film photography.
Interstellar was divisive when it came out, but its mixture of eye-popping special effects, gee-whiz scientific phenomena and environmental dystopia is starting to be viewed as a masterpiece. It may be Nolan’s most earnest movie.
His newest, Oppenheimer, stars Cillian Murphy in the title role of the creator of the atomic bomb. It marks Nolan’s first project since Dunkirk with a studio other than Warner Bros. He rounded up a top-notch cast that includes Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Robert Downey Jr., James D’Arcy, Kenneth Branagh and Matthew Modine. The film is set to open in 2023.