The one “awful thing” Christopher Nolan has always hated about period pieces
Christopher Nolan isn’t the first person to spring to mind when you think of filmmakers who make period dramas, but he’s made a few great ones in his time, like the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, which took us back to the era of nuclear development and World War II.
Nolan, of course, recreated the events of Dunkirk in the eponymous film, while The Prestige transports us to Victorian England. When it comes to period dramas, Nolan knows it’s going to be a challenge, because recreating a world that no longer exists – and that he wasn’t alive to see – is never going to be easy. But he won the ‘Best Director’ Academy Award for a reason, right?
The filmmaker accepts every challenge that comes his way, though, because if he couldn’t, well, he wouldn’t have gotten so far. But what happens when you have to make a period piece that also falls into the sci-fi genre? It’s never going to be easy to bring the futuristic nature of the genre to a landscape set in the past, with Nolan admitting that he often feels like he is “fighting the genre”.
In Tom Shone’s The Nolan Variations, the director explained, “This is often the case in films, but you’re fighting the genre, or you’re fighting what people envision it as. What I was saying the other day about Insomnia being a kind of wilderness movie or a fish-out-of-water story—we fought that, every step of the way. The Prestige was the same. Every time you cut to the exterior of a building or a street scene with wheel noises, like you’re used to on the BBC, it’s an awful thing.”
How do you get around such a challenge? You want your film to elevate itself above the look of a BBC drama, and that means making it as immersive as possible. Nolan had an idea for this wheel situation, though, because every part of his films has to be perfect.
The filmmaker explained, “So, I would say to Richard [King; sound designer], ‘Look, just make the fucking thing sound like spaceships; just find some interesting sound for the wheels, but just don’t make it sound like wheel noises.’ You can fight it, to a degree, but people think you’re a bit mad.”
Maybe madness is the secret to making your movie perfect, because it’s this attention to the most minor details that makes a period drama work, no matter the genre it exists within. Too many period dramas fall into the trap of looking like bland carbon copies of each other, and that’s what Nolan hates.
“The whole thing about a period film, shot in Los Angeles, on location, for Victorian London, was about, again, how could we not have this look like Covent Garden, how do we not have it look like Foyle’s War. And doing it in LA was fantastic, because it was just invigorating. It was so challenging,” he concluded.
The Prestige is a stunningly shot film, and it really does immerse you straight in the world of Victorian London in a way that feels deeply cinematic. Nothing about this period drama screams Foyle’s War.
