Christopher Nolan names his three favourite sci-fi movies
There are few filmmakers working in modern cinema who have the same cinematic ambition as Christopher Nolan, with the British director having made some of the most spectacular films of the contemporary industry. Only truly rubbing shoulders with the likes of Denis Villeneuve, Claire Denis and Martin Scorsese, Nolan is a visionary artist leading from the very forefront.
Rising to popularity at the dawn of the new millennium, Nolan’s feature filmmaking adventure started with the 1998 independent movie Following, released two years before his two-time Oscar-nominated mind-bending drama Memento, starring Guy Pearce. The powerful independent movie established the director as someone who wasn’t afraid of pushing boundaries, a fact that would be self-evident in his later filmography.
Taking a fond interest in comic-book movies and science fiction as cinema drew towards the 2010s, Nolan directed a duo of Dark Knight Batman movies, followed by the manic epic Inception, starring Cillian Murphy and Leonardo DiCaprio. Such sparked a fondness for the sci-fi genre, which he would later follow up with 2014’s Interstellar and 2020’s time-bending thriller, Tenet.
But, in Nolan’s eyes, these films are striving to replicate the greatness of his all-time favourite sci-fi flicks, a trio of iconic movies that would change cinema forever.
The first was released way back in 1927 when Fritz Land helmed the expressionist masterpiece Metropolis, starring Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich and Fritz Rasp. Recognised as one of the most influential movies of all time, Lang’s film tells the story of a utopian city where the son of a famous architect falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the arrival of a prophet.
Decades later, Stanley Kubrick would change the genre forever with his staggering 1968 achievement of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a sci-fi that would influence countless filmmakers for generations to come. An extraordinary mind-bending journey, the film tells the story of a group of astronauts who are sent to Jupiter to discover the origins of a peculiar monolith.
A vocal supporter of Kubrick’s film, Nolan expresses about the movie: “Ten years ago, the ideas of artificial intelligence [in 2001: A Space Odyssey] seemed a bit quaint, they seemed a bit passe. But then, over the past ten years, things have sailed back very much towards AI, the idea of talking assistants, you know, with Alexa and Siri and all these electronic assistants that you talk to, and the idea of AI: it’s all come back massively”.
The final film to grace his list is the 1984 Ridley Scott flick Blade Runner, which stars Harrison Ford as a police officer in charge of hunting down rogue androids known as replicants. Heavily inspired by another film on this list, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Scott’s movie featured some inspired set design and world-building, with every sci-fi since attempting to recreate its immersive feel.
Christopher Nolan favourite sci-fi movies:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1984)
- Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
