Christopher nolan

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: The director Christopher Nolan has spent a lot of time exploring the concept of time. His breakthrough movie "Memento" was a thriller told back to front about a man who had lost his short-term memory. As Nolan's films got bigger and more ambitious, he found different ways to manipulate time in movies like "Inception," "Interstellar" and "Dunkirk." His latest is a globe-trotting spy thriller called "Tenet." Some of the characters and objects in "Tenet" move backwards in time, a process the movie calls inversion. Others move forwards. I began my conversation with Christopher Nolan by asking why he keeps returning to this theme. CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Time is the most cinematic of subjects because before the movie camera came along, human beings had no way of seeing time backwards, slowed down, sped up. And I think that went some way to sort of explain to me why I've been interested in exploring it in movies because I think there's a really productive relationship. And I had this visual notion of a bullet that's in a wall, being sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of the gun it was fired from. And I put the image in "Memento," my early film, as a... SHAPIRO: Twenty years ago - the year 2000. NOLAN: Twenty years ago. Now you make me feel old, but yes, 20 years ago. SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Sorry. NOLAN: But I always harbored this desire to create a story in which the characters would have to deal with that as a physical reality. And that eventually grew over t...

Oppenheimer, which means it’s the perfect chance to catch up on his best one: Dunkirk, which is now streaming on Netflix. Dunkirk tells the true story of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers stranded on the French beaches of Dunkirk toward the beginning of the second World War. With Nazis encroaching from every side, most of the British army seemed hopelessly trapped, and the war doomed — after all, how could England defend itself without an army, let alone fight to help liberate the rest of Europe? But in the eleventh hour, a daring rescue plan came through to save the continent when hundreds of civilians sailed the channel to help rescue their boys. Image: Warner Bros. Because, it seems, he’ll never tell another story straight on, Nolan breaks the rescue narrative up, showing it from different perspectives and different time periods. We follow soldiers (Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles) stranded on the beach for days, a pilot (an excellent Tom Hardy) who arrives for the climactic last few hours, and the home-boating crew of Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and Peter’s friend George (Barry Keoghan). The story of the rescue at Dunkirk is already one of the most incredible, fascinating, and miraculous moments in modern history, but in the hands of Nolan, it’s equal parts panicked and inspiring. Nolan’s true trick with Dunkirk, and the advantage of the multiple perspectives he employs, is to show all the ways the operation w...

Thanks to his stylized, time-bending renovation of film noir conventions, director Christopher Nolan established himself as a creator of psychologically demanding films that defied classification. Though he made his feature debut with the ultra-low budget indie, "Following" (1998), Nolan put himself on the map with "Memento" (2000), a classic revenge story with the unique twist of being told backwards. Hailed by many critics and - by indie standards - made successful by a rabid audience, "Memento" quickly turned Nolan's fortunes, establishing him as a highly sought-after talent. He soon followed with the thriller "Insomnia" (2002), starring heavy-hitters Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams. But it was the blockbuster "Batman Begins" (2005) - a reimagined take on a long-defunct film franchise - that propelled Nolan to the upper tier of Hollywood directors. His dark, brooding take on the avenging crusader was much more aligned with its original intention than any other subsequent incarnation had been, earning critical praise, audience admiration and a large chunk of box office dollars. With "The Prestige" (2006), "The Dark Knight" (2008) and "Inception" (2010), his reputation as an auteur working in a blockbuster world was firmly cemented. Later works "Interstellar" (2014) and "Dunkirk" (2017) showed that his mastery of form extended to philosophical science fiction and gripping war drama as well. Photos BATMAN BEGINS, director Christopher Nolan on set, 2005, (c) Warn...

While not much more is known about the plot, viewers can expect a thrilling cinematic experience. In a statement to the AP issued Dec. 13, Nolan said that utilizing IMAX technology "is massively important in transporting the audience into the mind and experience of this person who forever altered our world." "There's a wealth of stuff out there and I will read it all," Murphy said. "I am never, ever going to understand quantum mechanics, no matter how hard or how many times people try to explain it to me. There's 0.0001 percent of the population on the planet who have the brainpower to understand that. But I can begin to understand, conceptually, what those guys were trying to do." "With something like a Nolan movie, you know it can be great and he's setting you up to be great," Peck told FIO Clips. "All you have to do is rise to the occasion and be prepared. You feel those nerves until you get there on the day and you realize that 'Oh, this is just like anything else, it's just the best version of it.'"

Long before he went on to make some of the biggest movies of all time, Christopher Nolan made one of the smallest. But despite its micro-budget (reportedly in the realm of $6000), his lo-fi debut is unmistakably Nolan – a sly, paranoid crime story told in non-chronological order, stacked with twists that unfold right until the very last second. The title refers to the habit of its lead character (known only as 'The Young Man', and played by Jeremy Theobald), who looks out for interesting people and just… follows them. But when one of his stalking subjects turns out to be a slick criminal Cobb (Alex Haw), it's not long before our lead is groomed into becoming a burglar. Shot in central London in black-and white, Following is a particularly Hitchcockian noir – with its mysterious buttoned-up masculine protagonists, an alluring blonde bombshell (Lucy Russell), and a spiralling descent into crime. At only 69 minutes, it's a brief but potent introduction to a filmmaker who would go on to much, much bigger things – but taking the ethos established here with him the whole way. If you're in a Christopher Nolan movie, chances are you're not going to get a relaxing night's sleep. Batman spends his evenings standing on the rooftops, glaring into the night. The dreamers in Inception wake up more knackered than when they dozed off. To paraphrase the Dylan Thomas verse that Michael Caine recites in Interstellar, nobody's going gentle into that good night. So it's no big surprise that on...