Christopher Nolan’s favourite action movies
There aren’t many directors who make movies of a similar scale to Christopher Nolan that favour creating, staging, and shooting practical and tangible action sequences as often as possible in an era where it’s arguably quicker, easier, and more effective to use CGI instead. And yet, it’s that old-school approach that’s helped him become one of the most marketable filmmakers in the industry.
Nolan’s name alone is more than enough to guarantee success, as evidenced by the three-hour drama Oppenheimer roaring past $950million at the box office. No stranger to an explosive set piece through his Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Dunkirk, to name but three, the five-time Academy Award nominee has revealed his inspirations and influences come from both the past and present of action cinema.
Unsurprisingly, given his well-known lifelong fandom, two James Bond movies make his list of personal favourites. However, George Lazenby’s sole stint under the tux being named as his number one is unexpected. Nonetheless, Nolan cited On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and its influence on Inception to Empire, remarking that “it’s a hell of a movie, it holds up very well.”
For a more classic approach that’s full of guns, girls, and gadgets, though, Nolan couldn’t see beyond The Spy Who Loved Me: “At a certain point, the Bond films fixed in my head as a great example of scope and scale in large scale images,” he said. “In The Spy Who Loved Me, the Lotus Esprit turns into a submarine and it’s totally convincing, and it works and you go ‘Wow, that’s incredible.’”
Michael Mann’s Heat may not be an action movie in the strictest sense of the word, but it does boast one of the best shootouts ever put to film and weighed heavily on Nolan’s The Dark Knight, leaving the director too not-so-subtly acknowledge that he’d “drawn inspiration from it in my own work.”
He would also tell Edgar Wright that he found Baby Driver to be “a phenomenal piece of work” when they interviewed each other for the Director’s Guild of America, with the seamless marriage of music and images that turn the entire film into one extended and immaculately-soundtracked chase sequence finding Nolan left awed by what he called “the showmanship of this movie.”
Two propulsive actioners set on a bus and a train don’t sound as if they’d be obvious touchstones for Dunkirk, either, but Nolan nonetheless praised the “relentless” Speed and the “ticking clock nail-biter” Unstoppable for how to create, maintain, and extract tension from a relatively simple narrative framework. Based on the triple-pronged story that saw his war epic tell distinct stories spanning land, sea, and air, it admittedly does make an incredible amount of sense in retrospect.
Christopher Nolan’s favourite action movies:
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969)
- Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
- Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017)
- Speed (Jan De Bont, 1994)
- Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010)
- The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977)
