Christopher Nolan’s abandoned return to British cinema: “I think another director will do that”
At this stage of his career, unless something goes tremendously awry, it’s incredibly unlikely that Christopher Nolan will ever make another British film. It can’t be ruled out, but the chances are slim.
For one thing, he hasn’t made one since 1998, and that was his micro-budget feature-length directorial debut, Following. While many of his pictures have been shot in and around the United Kingdom, you can’t call them British movies, what with the eye-watering budgets and American studios backing them.
Secondly, Nolan has made it clear that he won’t be returning to small-scale filmmaking any time soon, if at all. As one of the few behind-the-camera figures in the business who gets a blank cheque to make anything they want on whatever scale they deem necessary, he feels a sense of obligation to continue telling expansive, epic stories on gigantic canvases.
An increasing number of high-profile Hollywood movies are being shot in the UK, but that’s more to do with the generous tax breaks than anything else. It does seem odd that an Academy Award-winning auteur with a cut-glass accent who always wears a crisp suit on set and wouldn’t be caught dead without a flask of tea hasn’t made a British flick in three decades, but that’s the way it is.
That almost wasn’t the way it was, though, because at one stage, Nolan was eying an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel as his fourth feature, which is about as British as it gets. After Following, Memento, and Insomnia, he penned a screenplay for The Keys to the Street, until he was distracted by a bigger, shinier prize that pushed his career in a completely different direction.
“I think the script is very good,” he modestly explained. “I don’t think it’s what I want to do next. I think another director will do that. It’s a really cool script, but has a lot in common with the three films I’ve made, so it may not be the right film for me to do next.” As it turned out, it wasn’t the right film for him to do at all.
A London-set crime thriller, The Keys to the Street revolves around a serial killer who’s been murdering homeless men in the city’s parks and impaling them on fence posts, a central mystery that draws several other characters into its orbit. Nolan was right in that several of the key themes were similar to ground he’d already covered, so you can understand why he didn’t do it.
His script was intended to be a Fox Searchlight production, but having sufficiently impressed the studio with Insomnia, he decided to stick with Warner Bros. That led him directly to Batman Begins, the movie that established the Christopher Nolan: Blockbuster Auteur era audiences have known and loved ever since, and it’s curious to wonder what would have happened had he made a street-level British picture instead.
Despite Gemma Arterton being attached to star in a Nolan-less version in 2010, The Keys to the Street still hasn’t been brought to the screen. Meanwhile, Nolan ended up getting the keys to the whole Hollywood kingdom.
