Christopher Nolan’s three favourite sci-fi TV shows: “Amazing, prescient explorations”
Even if you’ve never seen a Christopher Nolan movie, which is unlikely when he’s one of the highest-grossing directors of the modern era, you can tell by even a cursory glance at his filmography that he’s a bit of a sci-fi nut.
Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet are all deeply rooted in the genre, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that his Dark Knight trilogy ticks some of the boxes, and even his period-set literary adaptation, The Prestige, hinges on a twist that takes what appeared to be a conventional mystery into fantastical territory.
There’s also the fact he’s been obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey since the first time he saw it as a child, a sentiment that can also be applied to the future filmmaker’s life-changing experience of watching Star Wars on the big screen, while he’s cited Ridley Scott, and Blade Runner in particular, as two of his paramount influences.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Al Reinert’s For All Mankind, Damien Chazelle’s First Man, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Richard Donner’s Superman, Scott’s Alien, and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind have all been listed by the Academy Award-winning auteur as personal favourites at one time or another, and they all feature sci-fi elements or space-set scenes.
Nolan probably wouldn’t go out on a limb and name any style of cinema as his preferred choice, but looking at both the films he’s made and the ones he’s inspired by, sci-fi would appear to be the closest thing. When it comes to the small screen, though, favouritism was largely replaced by nepotism.
In a conversation with The Atlantic about the potential perils of technology and how it applies to his own work, Nolan name-dropped two shows that he’s attached to for obvious reasons. “My brother has done four seasons of Westworld and five seasons of Person of Interest, which are amazing, prescient explorations of artificial intelligence and the security state and date security.”
Co-created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the first season of HBO’s Westworld was one of the most impressive first runs of any new series in the last decade. Unfortunately, it overstayed its welcome and fell off a cliff to such an extent that it was cancelled before it had the chance to wrap up the planned five-season run.
Person of Interest was much more of a slow burner, beginning life as a fairly standard action-heavy procedural before evolving into a surprisingly complex rumination on fate, destiny, free will, the notion of choice, the invasion of privacy, and how far the government is willing to go to keep the population in line. It might star the questionable Jim Caviezel, but it’s still an underrated gem of TV’s current ‘Golden Age’.
The third sci-fi series Nolan holds dear was more pronounced and had nothing to do with his family, though, since he was announced to be directing a feature-length version of 1967’s British classic, The Prisoner. It remains one of just two films that he was confirmed to be helming that never happened, and he wouldn’t sign on in the first place if he wasn’t deeply invested in the material, regardless of whether or not it came to fruition.
