Christopher Nolan in 2000 Photo: Getty/Barbara Alper
Back in the spring of 1992, my film seminar at University College London was a quiet presence dedicated to Scorsese, Powell and Pressburger (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Raging Bull, The Red Shoes, The King of Comedy): a tall, handsome, smartly dressed, reserved young man. Some of the brightest students are shy to speak; but silence does not always equal genius. This blond, serious student was slightly mysterious, but I had no way of knowing how dark a man he was: that he was already making films, or that he would soon become someone with his own adjective: “Nolan-ish.”
I don't remember him opening his mouth at all at these meetings. But his actions since then — culminating in seven awards for his stunning masterpiece Oppenheimer at last night's Bafta Awards and a further 13 Oscar nominations — have spoken louder than any words.
Ten years later, I flew to Los Angeles to interview (for this article) what the subtitle called «Hollywood's Hottest Young Director» about his upcoming studio film, Insomnia, starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams. Meanwhile, his first, very low-budget film, Following (1998), was released, filmed in Bloomsbury and starring mostly UCL contemporaries. I reviewed it on VHS and DVD, saying that «this black-and-white thriller with a double twist has its own melancholic, nervous sensibility, making it an extremely unsettling and deeply thought-provoking experience.»
This led to his breakthrough independent thriller Memento (released in 2000 after a painful period in which all the major studios refused to distribute it); I called it «superbly conceived and executed» and a «seriously alarming achievement,» but that was only part of a near-universal chorus of praise.
It was strange and wonderful then, having not seen him ten years ago, to find myself driving to the Hollywood landmark, Chateau Marmont (his choice), once frequented by Greta Garbo, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Howard Hughes, to talk to Christopher Nolan at breakfast. I asked him why, even though the film had already been shown on television, he still came to UCL to read English. “I had nothing else to do,” was his disarming response. “I started making films when I was about seven years old and knew I wanted to be a film director when I was 11 or 12 years old. My father was very encouraging, but noted that you might want to get a degree in something unrelated to film. what you want to do because it gives you a different perspective on things.
And of course,” he continued, “it was great to study English literature.” Getting us to think more about how we read books, analyze books, has been very helpful. I think I learned a lot more than, for example, in film school, because I had to make films at the same time.”
Christopher Nolan with Guy Pearce on the set of Memento in 2000. Photo: Shutterstock
It was inspiring. And then he said with a laugh, “Your film class is the only film class I’ve ever taken in my entire life.” Naturally I said, “I guess I better make myself known then,” but he said, “No, actually it was annoying as hell.”
I must have looked stunned. He reassured me: “It’s not your fault. In a good way, it put me off studying film that way, because if you want to be a director… I couldn't sit there… It's much easier to do it with books. When it comes to films, I was already too aware of the compromises that have to be made every day on set. But I really liked the films we watched. It was great. I loved The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
I have now read Tom Shone's 2020 book The Nolan Variations: The Films, Mysteries and Wonders of Christopher Nolan and learned more about his formative years as a boarder at Haileybury , playing for the first XV and surviving in this unforgiving man's world. can better understand his reserved dislike of everything, such as pretentiousness.
With a half-American childhood (he saw Star Wars a good six months before his English friends) and a father who worked in advertising, his tastes leaned towards populism, Ridley Scott and James Bond rather than arthouse or foreign cinemas. In addition, he was always entirely interested in making films.
Christopher Nolan with Cillian Murphy on the set of Oppenheimer Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
And, as he told James Bell in a fascinating and wide-ranging interview in the current Sight & Sound, noting his BFI scholarship: «I've always been very mainstream in my approach to reading about film, I haven't gone too deep into film theory or the more esoteric side.» I was relieved to see him say that as a student he had been uncomfortable “hearing my fellow literary students apply the tools of literary criticism to films… But over time, I have come to appreciate it more.”
< p>Nolan's real home during his time at UCL was not actually the English department, but the Film Society, which programmed and screened films, but also made them. It was there that he began his lifelong collaboration with his then-girlfriend, now wife, Emma Thomas, who read the story. He tells Tom Shawn that his English teacher once told him, “You should treat books the same way you treat movies.” His answer? «Great advice, but… as soon as he said it, I thought, this will never happen, so I'll have to pretend.» This doesn't sound promising.
Still, reading English has left its mark on Nolan's work: he often references The Odyssey, The Waste Land («I love that poem») or Raymond Chandler — all UCL texts; the black hole in Interstellar is the “literal heart of darkness,” a reference to Conrad; Robert Oppenheimer quotes John Donne (“Break my heart, three-person God”).
Christopher Nolan with Cillian Murphy and his wife, producer and UCL graduate Emma Thomas. Photo: Getty
He even learned from older, more refined texts, seeing connections to how film works, as he told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: «I have always preferred the medieval, Middle English approach to characterization to the more modern, psychological, novelistic approach to depiction.» characters in cinema, because in film, the character defined through action has always been the most powerful because it is visual and based on storytelling.»
Character driven by action might not seem like the obvious key to Oppenheimer, the story of a visionary physicist imagining processes invisible to the human eye, but Nolan pulls it off stunningly, prismatically combining music and imagery to dramatize the complex issues of physics. Using in-camera effects rather than CGI, Nolan brilliantly uses the second's delay between the first blinding flash and the deafening impact of the atomic bombs to create a terrifying picture of heartbreaking suspense that drives home the importance of the world. what we see.
And Nolan trusted his unwavering faith in his point of view, following Cillian Murphy's sublime, heartbreaking and ambiguous recreation of J. Robert Oppenheimer so closely and viscerally that it gave the film a deep tragic resonance. The complexities, difficulties and ambiguities at the heart of literary criticism remain at the center of Nolan's approach. He continues to apply what he said about Insomnia: «It's more reasonable to raise difficult questions and recognize that they are not easy to answer, and that you, as a director, can't just neatly sum up…» < /p> < img src="/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/117fc3cce28784408e3ed38e5c64a952.jpg" />
Like Scorsese's comparatively ambitious Killers of the Flower Moon, its Best Picture rival, Oppenheimer moves forward with a dynamic score (Ludwig Göransson) in service of his grandiose and terrifying vision, and moves along for three hours without allowing itself a second . in tension or emotional involvement. It also addresses some of the most horrifying events of the 20th century and challenges us to see how these events impact our current world.
In fact, I was especially moved by the realization that Nolan went beyond the completely indigestible bits of science fiction in Interstellar (2014) and Tenet (2020), justifying what remains science fiction . Here, weaving scientific fact with political history, Nolan has made a truly superb film, finding a theme and approach that convincingly brings to life for us the danger of humanity's destruction. Oppenheimer will deserve any Oscars he wins.
This quiet young man has made a big splash.
Philip Horne is Professor of English at UCL
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