Hear Me Out: Christopher Nolan is the modern-day Alfred Hitchcock
Christopher Nolan has paid tribute to many great directors who have influenced his work, including Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, David Lean, and Ridley Scott. One director who doesn’t make the list quite as often, though, is Alfred Hitchcock. His techniques for building mystery and suspense are a ubiquitous part of filmmaking nowadays, and Nolan, like every other director of thrillers, owes a debt to him. However, the similarities between the directors run much deeper than the content of their films.
Once you scratch the surface, the number of parallels is dizzying. Like Hitchcock, Nolan is a British filmmaker who only moved to Hollywood after attaining success independent of a major studio. Like Hitchcock, he keeps a tight inner circle of actors, crew members, and artistic collaborators. Like Hitchcock, he maintains tight control of the marketing of his films to build their mystique. And most importantly, like Hitchcock, Nolan has managed to create a rare niche in Hollywood. His movies feature certain hallmarks that have made him a commercially successful franchise in himself while also distinguishing him as an undisputed auteur.
No other filmmaker working in the Golden Age of Hollywood or today has had the same amount of creative and financial freedom from studios that Hitchcock had and Nolan continues to have. At a time when mid-budget movies are all but dead, these directors offer a blueprint for collaborating with studios and delivering immense box office success without compromising a singular artistic vision.
The key to both directors’ successes is repetition. Martin Scorsese once called Hitchcock a one-man franchise, pointing to the fact that anyone who went to a new Hitchcock release could expect certain things – a glamorous female actor (almost always platinum blonde), nail-biting suspense, sumptuous settings and costumes, an innocent man accused of a terrible crime, a climactic twist, and a cameo appearance from the director. The same is true of Nolan. Anyone who goes to a new Nolan release can expect a non-linear narrative, a sweeping soundtrack, a chilly colour palette, Cillian Murphy, and underwritten female characters.
As long as Hitchcock kept up his contract of expectations with his audience, he knew he could innovate around those constraints and still count on fans to buy tickets. Nolan is in the same position, if not more so. By maintaining his familiar hallmarks, he has been able to make comic book movies, a three-plus hour biopic of a mid-20th-century physicist, and an esoteric space epic, all of which have reaped significant financial rewards at the box office.
In terms of marketing, Nolan has taken a very different approach to Hitchcock, but with similar results. Hitchcock was a flamboyant marketer, appearing in elaborate trailers to build anticipation for new releases. Whether he was pretending to be a dead body floating in the Thames or brandishing a bird’s egg during a trailer styled as a lecture to promote The Birds, he promoted his films relentlessly without ever giving away key plot points. Nolan has taken the route of utmost secrecy. When promoting his films, he and his collaborators keep things under wraps, allowing just enough information to slip through the airwaves to fuel rampant speculation and anticipation.
During the ramp-up to the release of Oppenheimer, for example, early trailers avoided showing most of the starry cast, a decision that is indicative of Nolan’s drawing power. Audiences didn’t need to know that the movie would include Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, and Robert Downey Jr As long as it was a Nolan film, they were guaranteed to buy tickets. In both Hitchcock and Nolan’s cases, the filmmaker controls the marketing with an iron fist, showing exactly what they want the audience to see instead of turning it over to the studio’s marketing department.
One thing that Hitchcock did that Nolan has yet to do is trade on his powerful position to make something completely outside the box. In 1960, he staked everything, including his salary, reputation, and relationship with Paramount, to make a black-and-white slasher film. When the studio refused to finance the picture, irritated that they wouldn’t be getting another Technicolor suspense thriller, Hitchcock funded the project himself.
Psycho ended up being the biggest financial and artistic success of his career, proving yet again that his brand of auteur could succeed in both arenas. Whether or not Nolan chooses this route at some point remains to be seen, but given how clearly he was able to communicate his artistry and storytelling into his earliest, most inexpensive films, the potential is ready and waiting for him should he decide to take the plunge.
