Christopher Nolan’s favourite David Bowie movie: “Tailor-made for his talents”
It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan is a lifelong fan of David Bowie as both a musical icon and accomplished actor, and the Academy Award-winning filmmaker even broke a career-long rule for the chance to work with his idol.
On the very rare occasions when the director has approached an actor to offer them a role in one of his films and been turned down, he’s left it at that. However, he was so determined to cast Bowie as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige that he went back for a second attempt, which clearly worked when he accepted the part and played it with his signature brand of enigmatic charisma.
It was a pinch-me moment for Nolan to have one of his heroes appearing in one of his pictures, especially when Bowie had drastically scaled back his involvement in cinema. The Prestige was the first time he’d played a character other than himself on the big screen in six years and only the second time in a decade and a half.
Bowie wasn’t what anyone would call prolific as an actor, but his filmography was as eclectic as his constantly evolving music career. After all, who else would turn down the chance to play a James Bond villain but agree to a voice role in SpongeBob SquarePants or knock back the title character in Steven Spielberg’s Hook but happily send themselves up in Zoolander?
Performances in titles like Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth illustrated that Bowie was in his element collaborating with talented auteurs, and it was no different with Nolan and The Prestige.
However, the architect of the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer only has eyes for one of Bowie’s theatrical credits as his personal favourite, and it came in legendary Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima’s World War II drama Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.
“Few films have been able to capture David Bowie’s charisma, but Ōshima’s wartime drama seems tailor-made for his talents,” Nolan told Criterion. Seeing as this was the filmmaker naming his ten favourite films of all time and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence was the only one featuring Bowie, it’s safe to say it was, from his perspective, the highlight of the ‘Thin White Duke’ onscreen.
Bowie played a captured prisoner of war preparing to stand trial at a Japanese-occupied camp, with Tom Conti’s titular colonel attempting to smooth over the cultural divides between the inmates and those running the facility to prevent further bloodshed. It wasn’t his splashiest or showiest turn by any means, but as Nolan alluded to, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence allowed Bowie to channel his intangibles better than any other picture.
