Christopher Nolan | A layered traditionalist

In an interview, aired weeks before he went on the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to receive his first Academy Award, British filmmaker Christopher Nolan recalled the first movie he remembered seeing at a cinema: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Nolan said how he, as a young boy, hid behind the seats, frightened of the evil queen turning into a witch.

That young boy’s fear turned to fascination as he tumbled deep into the visual blackhole of movies — much like the protagonist in his Interstellar — through Star Wars, James Bond movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. While Nolan acknowledges the influence George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott had on his film making, his key to success lies with that frightened boy who realised the hold a movie can have on the audience and the emotions it can relay onto them.

Over his career, which stretches from the 1990 shortfilm Tarantella to the 2023 magnum opus Oppenheimer, Nolan had managed to cultivate multiple impressions on his audience. Some see a riddler in him, challenging the audience to figure out his works. Some see an innovatively classic filmmaker, who manages to infuse elements for commercial success into art house movies. Some others see a dedicated traditionalist prepared to go to any extent to avoid artificiality in his frames.

For others, he is an arrogant elitist, who splurges unnecessary budget while looking down on those without the luxury. However may he come across to his audience, Nolan finds motivation for his works in a simple line: “Love the thing you are doing” — and there is no question over his love for visual storytelling.

While he was fascinated by Hollywood blockbusters as a child, Nolan began to go ‘back in time’, to the world of silent movies, from the likes of German auteur Fritz Lang. These movies had to rely on visuals and partly background scores to connect with the audience without dialogues. The silent movies taught Nolan the scopes of visual storytelling. The tendency to lean into visuals and the multi-layered narration is what got him the tag of being difficult to discern. Nolan defends his layered approach by drawing parallels to the era he grew up in, where one will never get exposed to the same movie twice unless they choose to go back to the cinema for it. Nolan believes a good movie must compel the viewer to go back to it and he wishes to reward the returning viewer with something new every time.

Insistence for film

But it is not this layered approach that keeps Nolan aside from his contemporaries. It is his compulsion to shoot on film. Nolan sees an “economic imperative to push technologies” in newer and cheaper digital alternatives to films and is not ready to compromise the higher quality of images achievable by films. He claims to be able to differentiate between movies shot in films and digitally in a second. For the director who grew up being impressed by the “beauty and magnitude of images” in the Leicester Square, London, going digital was “watering down the film experience”. His want to give his audience the same feel he experienced growing up might be what drove him to stick with film.

He is also against computer-generated imagery, the green screens and motion sensors, which he feels alienate his actors from the story. Gary Oldman, who played commissioner Gordon in Nolan’s version of comic superhero Batman, remembers the director giving him specific instructions only twice throughout the trilogy. And one of them was, “there is more at stake”, to which Oldman needed no further clarification. Nolan feels such a process will not be possible if the actors are asked to perform with just green screens around them and are not grounded in the story.

Nolan says the rise of online streaming and digital tools will not affect the “communal experience” of traditional cinema. He grew up hearing “movies are dead”, a statement going around since the popularisation of TV in the 1950s. But, the Oscar winning director says, there is a need to preserve the tradition as “the history of cinema is the history of people looking after movies”.