Exploring Christopher Nolan’s unabashed love of ‘The Fast and The Furious’ franchise
Everyone enjoys a little bit of cinematic silliness now and again. However, Christopher Nolan standing proudly as one of the most high-profile fans of the Fast & Furious franchise is something of a head-scratcher.
That’s not to say he should be sitting in darkened rooms filled with a thin layer of smoky haze, watching black-and-white, auteur-driven masterpieces with every second of free time he gets. Still, the differences between his recent filmography and the ongoing adventures of Dominic Toretto and the gang are stark, to put it lightly.
While they operate in very similar budgetary ballparks, Nolan has become renowned for crafting complex, intelligent, and thought-provoking movies on a massive scale that regularly dominate awards season. In contrast, the more recent chapters in The Fast Saga have Vin Diesel defying gravity, Dwayne Johnson redirecting live torpedoes with his bare hands, and a blatant disregard for the laws of physics.
Essentially, they’re everything his expensive epics are not, but seeing as Fast & Furious is one of the highest-grossing properties in the history of cinema that’s gearing up to release its 11th mainline instalment more than 20 years after the first, he’s hardly in the minority being a huge fan.
Having previously described himself as a “sort of original recipe, the Rob Cohen original” kind of guy, Nolan quickly changed his tune to admit he’s “got a very soft spot for Tokyo Drift, actually.” If you took somebody who’d only seen The Fast and the Furious and then showed them Fast X immediately afterwards, the chances are high they’d be left wondering what the hell happened in between. Still, the Oppenheimer architect can’t get enough.
Tokyo Drift pretended to be a soft reboot of sorts. However, that was eventually folded back into the larger universe when Vin Diesel returned and began steering the series in a bigger, bolder, and dumber direction. That’s one of the major reasons why Nolan loves them, though, because “as they got crazier and bigger and crazier and bigger, they became something else, but something else kind of fun.”
It’s impossible to imagine Martin Scorsese outing himself as a diehard devotee of the Wizarding World, and there’s no chance Quentin Tarantino is suddenly going to declare himself obsessed with Transformers. At the same time, the possibility of Alejandro González Iñárritu falling head over heels for the Marvel Cinematic Universe is decidedly slim. They’re all filmmakers on the same pedestal as Nolan in terms of status, acclaim, and awards recognition, but he’s proud to wear his Fast & Furious fandom on the sleeve.
At the end of the day, people like what they like, and Nolan loves himself some preposterous automotive shenanigans. He’d never dare to make a film along similar lines, and he’d probably have no clue where to even begin. However, his admiration for The Fast Saga displays that despite his reputation for maintaining a stiff upper lip, never wearing anything but an immaculately crisp suit, and turning the thinking viewer’s blockbuster into an art form, he’s got the softest of spots for popcorn-munching escapism.
Depending on who you ask, Fast & Furious may not even qualify as cinema in the strictest sense, but Nolan would staunchly disagree.
