The legendary actor Christopher Nolan found scary: “He’s very aware of the baggage he carries”
Thanks to one of modern cinema’s most storied and successful careers, Christopher Nolan is now in a position where at least one generation of aspiring actors would bend over backwards to get the opportunity to star in one of his productions.
Oppenheimer marked the crowning achievement after winning seven Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, but Nolan was already one of the industry’s foremost filmmakers before then. The catalyst came with Batman Begins, which elevated him into the blockbuster arena while indicating that he didn’t need to compromise his creative and artistic principles to succeed.
Ever since then, Nolan has basically had the freedom to make whatever he wants however he wants to make it, and for however much, he needed it to cost, which by extension means that unless something drastic changes and he experiences one of the biggest falls from grace ever, he won’t be remaking somebody else’s movie ever again.
In between his breakthrough feature Memento and his Batman reboot, Nolan put his own spin on Erik Skjoldbjærg and Nikolaj Frobenius’s Insomnia. Recruiting living legends Al Pacino and Robin Williams to lead the line as a dogged detective and suspected murderer, respectively, they were by far the two biggest names he’d ever directed, with production kicking off in April 2001 when the director was only 30 years old.
As a result, the intimidation factor was very much in play, as the filmmaker admitted to the BBC. “I’ve grown up watching these guys on screen; they’re complete legends to me,” he said. “Going to meet Pacino was really rather scary. But he’s very aware of all the baggage he carries. He’s aware that somebody like me coming into the room for the first time is terrified of him, so he immediately puts you at ease.”
Once he’d put his fears to one side, the question turned to filling the other half of Insomnia‘s star-powered central duo. For Nolan, he was actively seeking somebody who could match Pacino as “a very large presence, a monolithic figure, at the centre of the movie.” He needed somebody to “balance Pacino’s presence with somebody who’s similarly interesting as a movie star but for completely different reasons,” which led him straight to Williams.
Casting the beloved comedian firmly against type as a cold and calculating killer was a masterstroke, with the two heavyweights generating plenty of sparks opposite each other as Insomnia’s slow-burning game of cat and mouse unfolds.
Nolan was suitably enthralled by Williams’ performance, but Pacino’s hangdog world-weariness is the glue that holds the narrative together, and the young director found himself quickly overcoming his awestruck admiration of the two leads to pit them against each other in a masterful noir thriller that unfolds entirely in the blinding sunlight.
