Christopher Nolan names the three greatest blockbuster movies ever made: “We’re never let off the hook”
It’s been two decades since Christopher Nolan made a modestly budgeted movie, and if he gets his way, which he probably will, he’ll never return to small-scale filmmaking for the rest of his career.
Since he helmed The Prestige for a moderate $40 million back in 2006, Nolan’s next eight features all cost at least nine figures, but since he’s one of the few directors in the business who can open a picture at the box office based on his name alone, the financial risk is always worth the reward.
The two-time Academy Award winner has explained that he feels an obligation to continue playing in the largest possible sandbox and painting on the largest possible canvas because it’s an opportunity that few are ever awarded, especially with the kind of creative freedom and lack of studio oversight he enjoys.
That’s fair, but it also makes it harder and harder to remember that Nolan started off with barely two pennies to scrape together. His debut, Following, cost around $6,000, and Memento was ten times as expensive to produce, but still cheap. By the time he made it to Batman Begins, the budgetary increase between his first and fourth films was almost 2.5 million per cent.
He felt a sense of obligation, not just in reinventing the character after the disastrous Batman & Robin, but by making a blockbuster that stood up to scrutiny. It did, for better and worse, by ushering in the age of the dark and gritty reboot, but his mantra was simple: direct the kind of spectacle-driven flick he loved as a nipper.
“It’s the reason I made it,” he explained to Scott Holleran. “Because I loved these movies growing up, and I felt like it’s been a very long time since I’d seen that type of film.” When asked to name exactly which titles he was talking about, three came to mind: “Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Spy Who Loved Me, the first Star Wars.”
“These are the films when I was seven years old that came about, and they created entire worlds that you believed in, and they had a very tactile, realistic, concrete sense of place and texture,” Nolan continued. “And, though they were all dealing with fantastic, outrageous material, they were all extreme exaggerations with idealistic heroes, but they had a recognisable taste and smell.”
Those three made Nolan “believe in the reality of what we see for two hours,” and that’s how he approached his own blockbuster bow. “We’re never off the hook,” he added. “We’re on that rollercoaster, and we’re not looking at a cartoon.” It’s debatable if The Spy Who Loved Me can be called one of the best big-budget offerings in Hollywood history, but since it’s his favourite James Bond movie, we’ll let him off.
Although Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars are absolutely up there, it would be foolish to talk about cinema’s greatest-ever blockbusters without also dropping the likes of Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Jaws, The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps even Nolan’s own The Dark Knight into the equation, even if he’s much too modest for that.
