Christopher Nolan and the quest to understand (Part One)

In this the first of a three part series Michael Kirke examines the work of film director Christopher Nolan.

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Tenet was Christopher Nolan’s eleventh feature film, released to cinemas on the reopening of theatres after the pandemic restrictions. Like other Nolan films – but even more so – it left many audiences scratching their heads with its very challenging interpretation of our relationship with time, space and technology. Nolan takes no prisoners when it comes to making demands on his audience. His motto is no less than this: “The only thing you can do is trust your initial instincts. You just have to say ‘This is what I’m making. This is what I’m doing. This is why I wrote this script.’ It is going to work. Just trust it.”

In all eleven films, not one of them has failed to repay that trust for anyone who really takes his oeuvre seriously. In a certain way, for anyone who places that trust in his instincts, every one of them replicates the history of his first Hollywood release, Memento.

Tom Shone, in his fascinating study of Nolan, built around occasional interviews with him over practically the entire span of his career, tells the story of Memento’s creation and release.

Memento is a story, told backwards, of a man who after an assault in which his wife was murdered, has lost his short term memory. He is now hunting the perpetrator of the crime. 

After two years pitching Memento to studios and distributors, getting it filmed grudgingly, it was finally released into eleven theatres. It took in $352,243 in its first week. Word got around and in the second week it was in fifteen theatres, where it took in another $353,523. 

Among the distributors who had initially turned the film down, Shone tells us, was Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. Smelling the coffee they then tried to buy the film. But now, in its third week, it was in seventy-six theatres, taking in $965,519. “Miramax could only watch as the film took off, spending four weeks in the top ten, sixteen in the top twenty, eventually playing in 531 theatres, a larger number of venues than even Jaws played in during the summer of 1975.” The film eventually made £40 million and got two Oscar nominations. They were a heady two years for Nolan, his brother Jonathan who had collaborated with him on the film, and his wife Emma Thomas who became his longterm producer.

After that came Insomnia and with that Hollywood’s “trust” in Nolan’s instincts – helped by his own canny and careful playing of the whole Hollywood machine – was no longer much of a problem. It just became a story of onwards and upwards. The next decade and a half saw this team making such billion-dollar blockbusters as The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017), earning $4.7 billion worldwide.

Michael Mann (Heat, The Last of the Mohicans), one of the dominant directors in Hollywood in the 1990s, says of Nolan, “He works within the system here in a very commanding way. He has large ideas. He invented the post-heroic superhero. He came up with an idea for a science-fiction heist inside the moving contours of a dreaming mind and he had the boldness and audacity to have that singular vision and make it happen. I think that the reason he has such a great response and great resonance with people is because he operates very much in the present, in the now. He’s tuned into the reality of our lives, our imagination, our culture, how we think, how we try to live. We’re living in a post-modern, post-industrial world with decaying infrastructure. Many feel disenfranchised. Seclusion is difficult. Privacy is impossible. Our lives are porous. We swim in a sea of interconnectedness and data. He directly deals with these intangible but very real anxieties. The quest to understand that and to tell stories from there, that is a central motivator for him, I think.”

The late British director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout) said Nolan worked in the commercial arena and yet there’s something very poetic about his work. They’re marvellously disguised. Memento has this backward-running time scheme, and yet you automatically find yourself applying the situation to oneself, to one’s daily life, which is very strange.”

“Poetic” is key.

Echoing something that Michaelangelo is supposed to have said, Nolan maintains that “I’m definitely a subscriber to the school of thought that when the writer is working, or the filmmaker is working, it’s because you’re uncovering something, like the sculptor carving something away because it was always there.”

Nolan feels that what he does “is based more in artifice and abstraction and theatricality. I feel more of a craftsman than an artist…. I think there are filmmakers who are artists. I think Terrence Malick is an artist. Maybe it’s the difference between saying ‘are you using it to express something purely personal, that comes from inside that you’re just trying to get out there, or are you trying to communicate with people, and tap into their expectations and their experience.’” 

I doubt this distinction. These film-makers are both poets and artists – or as Andrei Tarkovsky would have put it, “sculptors in time”.  For Nolan, Malick’s The Thin Red Line is one of the best films ever made. Tarkovsky’s Mirror was one of the influences, particularly in its theme of parent-child relationship, in the making of Interstellar.

One of the most impressive things about Nolan as a person is how he never loses sight of the really essential things about our life in this world. 

For him “The Prestige was an important film in terms of work-life balance because we’d just had our third child and Emma, even though she loved the project, was quite keen to step back and not be as involved. She wanted to be able to take more of a backseat.” In fact she did not need to. They worked it out as a family. The Prestige was about two obsessive Victorian magicians who ruined their lives and their families because of their obsession. Everything that Nolan – or I should say the Nolans – has done connects with life and living our lives in this world.

Family again became an issue while making The Dark Knight. “The family were around for an enormous amount of the film, but Emma was pregnant with Magnus at the time. The last two months, I think, I was in England, finishing the film, and they had to be back here. I was able to be present for Magnus’s birth; I flew over, but I had to go right back to England and carry on the film. I spent about two months there. To this day, I think that’s the longest I’ve been away from them. I remember thinking, I know it’s more fun when we’re all together and we can do the thing together. That’s why we keep it as a family business. We were learning how to balance those things.”

Nolan communicates with his audience on the basis that it knows the truth: the world is simple. But it also knows its miseries. He sets out to make them wonder at that dichotomy. It would be depressing – if one were to go down Sartre’s existential rabbit hole. He doesn’t. “The reason it’s not”, he says, “is we want the world to be more complicated than it is. It’s pleasurable, because what it’s really saying is there’s more to this place than meets the eye. You don’t want to know the limits of your world. You don’t want to feel this is all there is. I make films that are huge endorsements of the idea that there’s more to our world than meets the eye.” That is exactly what poets do. 

T.S. Eliot has been one of the poetic and cultural influences in his life. Referring to Four Quartets, Eliot’s very Christian masterpiece about time and memory, he reflects, “I come back to that one a lot: ‘Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden.’ It’s very cinematic. All of Eliot is. I think I first encountered Eliot through Apocalypse Now, where Brando reads parts of The Hollow Men. When I first watched that film, I was so fascinated by that sense of madness and enigma. Then later I read The Waste Land, which absolutely confounded me. I love that poem.”

Nolan’s family and educational background is Catholic and Christian – a thoroughly Catholic prep school run by Josephite priests, who ran a series of seminaries and boarding schools as far afield as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was followed by pre-university years boarding in an up-front Anglican high school. 

“At the time, it’s like you’re a bunch of kids and they’re the enemy,” says Nolan. “It’s like they’re trying to make you take it seriously and praying, and you’re sort of naturally reacting against that, not in any intellectual way or anything, but I come from that era, the seventies, when there wasn’t any doubt in anybody’s mind that science was supplanting religion.”

Significantly he adds, “Of course, now I’m not sure that’s the case. That seems to have shifted somewhat.” A transition in faith not unlike that of Eliot himself.

In the second part of this article, in the next issue, I hope to look at some of the work Nolan has left us with, and in particular to show that those who find themselves bewildered by aspects of it should not be. But before we do that, we need to clarify one thing about Nolan’s use of images and concepts from science in the unfolding of the metaphors with which he shows us the world in which we live, or, scarily, might live. 

In The Divine Comedy, Dante describes Hell, Purgatory and Heaven to us in images created by him using the analogies available to him and his readers in his time. Both he and they knew that those supernatural realities were nothing, are nothing, like his description of them. His visions of them, however, still help us to understand our flawed nature, who we are and what may be in store for us in eternity. 

Nolan, in the imagery he offers us which asks us to think about time, space, the workings of the human mind do not purport anything other than reasonably consistent approximations of the science of those things. They are not scientific treatises and I think people’s bewilderment to a great degree comes from thinking of them as such. The poverty of our poetic imagination in this modern – or postmodern – world kills our capacity to see the truth of so much of what Nolan is saying to us.