Christopher Nolan’s 10 favourite movies
Ever since Christopher Nolan released his debut feature in 1998, he’s gone from strength to strength. Following was an ingenious neo-noir, painting London with the same black-and-white brush as the films it was inspired by and utilising its budgetary and time constraints as a tool for discipline. The premise was simple: one man and his voice-over lead us around England’s capital, weaving in and out of the lives of whoever our voyeuristic protagonist chooses – until he chooses the wrong target and gets sucked into a seedy world of crime and danger.
Nolan followed his micro-budget first film with the studio-backed Memento, another noir-tinged thriller that cemented the director’s style as one dealing with high concepts, unique narrative techniques and compelling, blood-pumping storylines. As we await the imminent release of Oppenheimer, the newest film from the director that will depict the creation of the first atomic bomb, it’s hard not to marvel at how far Nolan has come.
Precisely a decade after his low-fi debut, Nolan gave us the second instalment in his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight. In ten years, the man went from making a $6,000 indie film to directing a ground-breaking and revolutionary superhero film that grossed $1billion at the box office and is still widely considered not just the best movie of its genre but one of the best films of the 21st century. He now exists as one of the few filmmakers that straddle the line between studio films and arthouse, making high-brow and original films with budgets the size of a small city.
Like many of the greats in cinema, Nolan was making films from an early age, and he joined the ranks of the likes of Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese, who all can recount experimenting with a Super 8mm camera as a child. With a career spanning 25 years and still counting, the director has seen a significant portion of what cinema has to offer. Whether directly influencing his filmmaking or simply standing out as a masterclass in the medium, there are several films that Nolan has identified as his favourites.
When shooting Batman Begins in 2005, there were three specific films that informed his approach to his first big-budget superhero film. With ‘big’ being the keyword, Nolan spoke about the effect Michael Mann’s 1995 thriller had on his approach to the city of Gotham. “Batman Begins had been as big as we could make it,” he commented. “One of the biggest epic films I have ever seen is Michael Mann’s Heat. That is a true Los Angeles story, just wall-to-wall within the city. Okay, we’ll make it a city story.”
On the actual design of the fictional city, Nolan turned to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner for inspiration on how to physically construct and shoot Gotham. “Blade Runner is actually one of the most successful films of all time in terms of constructing that reality using sets,” the director explains. “With Batman Begins, I immediately gravitated toward the visual treatment that Ridley Scott had come up with, in terms of how you shoot these massive sets to make them feel real and not like impressive sets.”
Nolan’s first Batman film had a great villain in the form of Cillian Murphy’s scarecrow. His follow-up in 2008, however, gave us the greatest supervillain modern audiences have ever seen with Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. With such a rich understanding of cinema history, it’s not altogether surprising that he found inspiration for crafting a villain in German expressionism, citing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as a “key touchstone” and his 1933 film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse as “essential research for anyone attempting to write a supervillain.”
When the director transitioned into full-blown sci-fi with Interstellar, his wide-screen epic approach was undeniably evocative of Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As it turns out, Nolan is entirely aware of this: “You can’t pretend 2001 doesn’t exist when you’re making Interstellar“. The director also praised the authenticity of the world-building in Kubrick’s masterpiece, recalling to Entertainment Weekly how he “didn’t doubt this world for an instant” when he watched it and that it had a “larger-than-life quality”. Whilst in a different realm to 2001, despite technically being in the same ‘genre’, Nolan also acknowledged during an interview wirth Business Insider the profound effect watching Star Wars had on him as a young aspiring director. He said: “From the second I saw Star Wars, everything was spaceships and science-fiction”.
Another ‘space film’ played a prominent role in making Interstellar, although this one was much more grounded in reality. “The other film I’d have to point to is The Right Stuff,” the director told Indiewire. “I screened a print of it for the crew before we started because that’s a film that not enough people have seen on the big screen. It’s an almost perfectly made film”. Based on Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction novel of the same name, the film details the various generations of test pilots that paved the way for the Space Race in the 1960s.
Three years after Interstellar, Nolan brought his epic scope to the World War II film in a traditionally Nolan-esque way. Featuring very little dialogue and refusing to focus on a central character, Dunkirk depicted the Second World War as a brutal and sensory experience divided into soldiers on land, sailors on the sea and pilots in the sky. Finding inspiration in the most unlikely places, Nolan mentioned another Scott film that served as a jumping board, citing the 1979 sci-fi horror Alien as “an established classic of tension”. Yet again defying expectations, the second film to inform his approach to suspense and tension came in the form of a Keanu Reeves-led action thriller. The 1994 film Speed, which follows a bus that must maintain acceleration or be blown up, has been revered by Nolan as a “ticking-clock nail-biter”.
Thirdly, during a special BFI screening of Dunkirk, Nolan revealed that there was one distinctly British masterpiece from which he drew upon many elements. Praising the 1981 classic, the director said: “The visual splendour, intertwined narratives, and aggressively anachronistic music of Chariots of Fire combined to create a masterpiece of British understatement”. He added how the spectacle helped its otherwise unorthodox approach to filmmaking, explaining how its “popularity rapidly obscured its radical nature”.
In many ways, Nolan does feel like a modern-day David Lean. Bold, British and exceptional at navigating huge budgets, gargantuan sets and top-tier acting talent to produce the most thrilling and sumptuous blockbuster films of the 2000s. It makes sense that Lean’s quintessential wide-screen film, Lawrence of Arabia, has left an indelible mark on Nolan’s consciousness. The sheer scale and scope of Lean’s films can also be seen in any one of Nolan’s, but the way the director captured landscapes on celluloid is particularly praised, with Nolan commenting on how “the very subtle shadow detail and the particular tonality of skies” emerge much sooner on a 70mm screening than a digital version.
Christopher Nolan’s 10 favourite movies:
- Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1984)
- Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
- The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)
- Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994)
- Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
