Christopher Nolan doesn’t mind if you watch his movies on your phone
For years, Christopher Nolan has been subjected to jokes about his precious approach to film consumption. If you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen cinephiles and Nolan enthusiasts alike mocking the director’s belief that movies should always be seen in cinemas, poking fun at it by threatening to watch Dunkirk on an iPhone or Inception on a Nintendo DS.
From the time-bending Tenet to the gravitas of Oppenheimer, there’s always a huge scope and complexity to Nolan’s filmmaking and storytelling. As such, it’s understandable that he hopes for audiences to entirely immerse themselves in the worlds he creates, to afford his visuals the biggest screen available and surround themselves with the soundscapes that accompany them.
But it seems that the long-running joke surrounding Nolan’s specificity could be a myth. In Tom Shone’s The Nolan Variations, the director suggested that he is less precious about the cinema-going experience than the rumours seem to suggest. In fact, he doesn’t even mind if you watch his creations on a phone screen.
Mimicking the questions he likely receives on a regular basis, he began, “‘Well, do you have a problem with people seeing Dunkirk on my phone or whatever?’ No, I don’t.” It’s a statement that might shock some, but his opinion on small-screen watching isn’t that simple. It comes in the shadow of the theatre experience, which he believes is entirely different.
“But the reason I don’t is because it’s put into these big theatres as its primary form or its initial distribution,” he explained, “And the experience trickles down, to the extent where, if you have an iPad and you’re watching a movie, you carry with you the knowledge and your understanding of what that cinematic experience would be, and you extrapolate that.”
“So when you watch a TV show on your iPad, your brain is in a completely different mindset,” he concluded. It’s an interesting spin on the opinions that have surrounded the filmmaker for years. The impact of Interstellar’s expansive cinematography and the drama of Christian Bale’s Batman suit is certainly lessened when you replace IMAX with an iPad because it’s an entirely different watching experience.
While one experience may be preferable to the other, to Nolan, to the art, or to audiences themselves, the director might not be quite as specific about how you consume his work as we all once believed him to be. Still, those jokes are sure to surround him for years to come.
