The directors and movies that make up Christopher Nolan’s unique style
Filmmakers who have their own distinctive style and singular approach to cinema aren’t necessarily interested in tossing the rulebook out of the window and reinventing the medium in their own image, with an amalgamation of influences having helped shape the work of Christopher Nolan into what it is.
The Academy Award winner makes movies on the largest possible scale, but they’re never designed to be mindless entertainment. They’re plenty entertaining, though, with Nolan striking a balance between auteurism and populism that’s distinctly his. He’s not the only one who works that way, but audiences know one of his films when they see it.
In fact, that dynamic is perfectly encapsulated by two classics Nolan acknowledged as massive influences. They occupied the same genre and revolutionised the arena of visual effects, but Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and George Lucas’ Star Wars were poles apart in virtually every other respect.
One was the meticulously crafted, existential, expansive rumination on the human experience and the inherent perils of how much knowledge can be too much. The other was an action-packed adventure that cribbed from old-school serials and Akira Kurosawa to seize the zeitgeist and shatter box office benchmarks.
Strip them down to their core components, and the end result is something approximating a Nolan movie. His Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Interstellar are massive-scale epics that come at an enormous cost. While he mirrors both Kubrick and Lucas by favouring practical set pieces and pushing the limits of in-camera technology, he leans towards the former in his favoured themes of time, mortality, and identity without shying away from the latter’s ability to craft mass-marketed escapism.
He lifted his “portrayal of mental states and memory” directly from Terrence Malick and The Thin Red Line, which he called “a revelation” for the way the film is constantly “cutting to memories or flashbacks with simple cuts”. It’s a technique he’s adopted across multiple pictures, including Memento, The Prestige, and Inception, not to mention Dunkirk and Tenet, to a certain extent. for the way their narratives alternate between different perspectives and points of view, both literal and psychological.
His eye for an immaculately composed vista is taken straight from the David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia cinematography. Alfred Hitchcock’s ground-breaking mastery of visual suspense informed everything from Dunkirk to Oppenheimer. Of course, there are the fingerprints of James Bond that Nolan has admitted to plastering all over Inception and The Dark Knight, to name just two.
Ridley Scott – particularly Blade Runner – set the foundation for Nolan’s immersive world-building. Richard Donner’s Superman instilled him with a childlike sense of awe that’s been pivotal to the ever-increasing size of his most accessible and explosive adventures. Those movies and everything else listed above were tossed into a melting pot, stirred around, cooled, and then moulded into the unmistakable style that’s made him one of the industry’s foremost cinematic voices.
