The 1971 exception to the movie genre Christopher Nolan can’t stand: “I completely forgot”
Even the best directors in the business know that there are some genres they’d be woefully ill-equipped to tackle, with Christopher Nolan adamant that one form of filmmaking will always remain at arm’s length.
Steven Spielberg has tackled almost every genre under the sun, but he’s still never made a western, despite threatening it for years. Based on his body of work, there’s every chance he’d be able to make a seamless transition to those dusty plains, but perhaps the shadow of John Ford looms a little too large.
Ron Howard is another industry veteran who hasn’t left many boxes unticked, but horror has remained forever out of his grasp. Like Spielberg, he keeps saying that he’s planning to get around to it eventually, but he’s not exactly the kind of director you can believe would have audiences cowering in fear.
Nolan is in a similar boat, since he’s named horror as one of the remaining items on his to-do list. He’ll probably never make a comedy, as interesting as it would be to see if he could shake off his stiff-upper-lipped image and try to make something hilarious, but he has claimed that all of his pictures are comedies in one way or another, which they absolutely are not.
The image of Nolan in the cinematic consciousness is that of a studious, serious, and contemplative auteur, one who often faces accusations of making cold and emotionally distant films, albeit made by someone who also loves the Fast & Furious franchise, MacGruber, and thinks Woody Harrelson’s performance in Kingpin is one of the greatest in modern cinema.
Can you imagine him cutting loose, upending expectations, and mounting an all-singing, all-dancing, dizzying spectacular where his cast stops every few minutes to belt out the latest in a never-ending stream of catchy showtunes? No? Well, neither can he.
“I don’t really get musicals, and I always used to say that I would do anything except musicals,” he offered, which is fair enough, because nobody’s really clamouring for him to do one, either. That said, rules are made to have exceptions, and for Nolan, it was a generational childhood staple.
“There are a lot of films that I saw as a kid that I didn’t really remember as musicals,” the two-time Academy Award winner explained. “Like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I completely forgot that it was a musical. I watched it again a few weeks ago, and I saw it in a different way.”
Gene Wilder’s tour-de-force turn as Roald Dahl’s chocolate maker is a musical, of that there’s no doubt, but the more you rewatch it as you get older, the more you realise that it’s also a lot darker and altogether creepier than those rose-tinted memories of watching it on what felt like every Sunday afternoon. Musicals? Can’t stand ’em. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory? He’ll make an exception.
